If we use our heads we can still find a future that works in a world of robots

Having lost my own (hi-tech) job after 24 years with one employer, I can understand how a Luddite feels and the “rise of the robots” outlined in your 3 January editorial may raise a hammer or two. However, perhaps a more constructive solution will transpire.

There is little doubt now that jobs in deep knowledge-based industries will be lost through AI and that robotic manufacturing will permit custom manufacture of many goods, from skateboards to selfdriving HGVS.

If the manufacturers can find the markets for all these geewhiz products, there is clearly a lot of cast-off material heading for landfill or the sea. If the Chinese or Indians won’t take our waste (why should they?), we will need to handle it ourselves (and so we should).

I believe that it will be many tens of decades before robots with the general intelligence and agility of a human worker will be around to dismantle and sort a random range of parts from goods like toasters or washing machines.

Further, we have no option but to recycle all this valuable material and to not consider the process beneath us. For many decades, tens of thousands of people worked in mass production factories doing utterly boring repetitive jobs, hour after hour for years on end.

On the other hand, every dismantling job will be different and challenging. In our local community makerspace (The T-exchange), one of the most popular jobs, particularly with young people, is dismantling PCS and vacuum cleaners and extracting the components.

The other big opportunity is that much of this material, like plastics, can be reused locally or, like copper and aluminium, regionally. Much of the thermoplastics can be converted into filament for 3D printers. For example, our local “makerspace” members have made LED lamp standards, replacement parts, even a domestic wind turbine using filament made from PET lemonade bottles.

I have to say that the filament used was supplied by a company based in The Netherlands as none is available in Scotland. Of course, there is also the possibility for the development of new recyclable materials with eco-friendly properties. For instance, a German company has developed a plastic based on the natural, organic material lignin for injection moulding.

The Americans have produced a thermosetting plastic called PHT which can be easily broken down into its monomer source materials.

The future lies not in our destructive hammers but in our own constructive heads.

BILL GRAHAM Findhorn Road, Forres