Army of robots?

[Kushty]

If the world could create cheap robots that could do most menial tasks currently performed by manual labour what effect do you think it would have on the world economy?

By menial tasks I mean pretty much anything from flipping burgers to security, cleaning, mining. Not the robots of today which generally cost a lot and perform one fairly repetitive task in one location but fairly intelligent autonomous robots.

[evilsatan]

I think AI will be the beginning of the end. I have thought about this before, were robots to replace most manual tasks then the majority of the current workforce would have to work in the factories building the robots. It would have a very strange effect though, lots of unemployed, people possibly earning less so can't spend as much so the robots wouldn't have been a good investment.

Robots would probaly only be used for dangerous/lucrative tasks where the company would save a lot of money, or sold for home use.

[marcode]

i like to think they will be our slaves and once they can do all the stuff humans can do, we can go on permanent vacation.

itll be like wall-e...