COLIN HOGG

COLIN’S CASE FOR ROBOTS TAKING OVER OUR JOBS

My mother-in-law told her daughter (my darling wife) that if she (the darling wife) kept going out of town so much because of her job, she’d come home one day to find I’d locked her out.

“Never,” I said when I heard this nonsense. “Why would

I do such a thing? Who’d pay the bills?” And, anyway, I don’t really mind being regularly abandoned. In fact, I’ve become quite used to it. I do start talking to the cat after three days, but the darling’s not often away that long. Though if she is, sometimes the cat starts talking back to me.

I like to think of myself as a modern sort of guy, despite my age. And, after all, it’s almost as perfectly okay these days, as it was in the olden days, to be a stay-at-home spouse. Especially now that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s partner Clarke is going to be staying at home to mind the baby when Jacinda goes back to work.

I don’t have a baby to mind any more, but I do have plenty of other things to be getting on with to make the executive wife’s life just that little bit easier. Or so I hope. It’s always a nervous situation being a kept man and there’s no point in me trying to hide it.

But these are nervous times for men. Things are suddenly changing quite fast and there’s really not that much good news for chaps. For instance, according to a story I read recently, men are much more likely than women to be replaced by robots in their jobs.

This, apparently, is because women tend to dominate the workplaces that require high levels of social skills, such as teaching, nursing and caregiving, where it’s tricky to replace a human with a machine.

Women, on average, have higher levels of skills and education, giving them an advantage over the simpler, more labour-oriented jobs often filled by blokes.

And it is a bit scary how quickly the robots are getting ready to come in to take away the jobs. My dentist, just the other day, mentioned he’d been off at a conference where a speaker reckoned robotic dental hygienists are on the way, sending a bit of a tremble through the conference room.

The news sent a tremble through my dentist’s nurse. “I’m sure you’re irreplaceable,” I tried to say, but her boss had his hand in my mouth and I don’t think she heard me properly.

I’m not very worried about robots myself. I’m pretty sure they can’t write magazine columns yet and I really quite fancy having a robot around the house to help out with the hoovering and the washing, if that could be arranged, at low cost, quite soon, please!

I also like the idea of cars that drive themselves, self-cutting lawns, self-cleaning bathrooms and self-making beds. There has been very little progress in these areas and the sooner those robots arrive the better.

Not to take our jobs away, though. Not unless there are other jobs on offer for the left over humans. Possibly polishing the robots.