People often express a lot of concern about how robots are taking human jobs. Here’s a job I think pretty much any human worker would be willing to hand over to the machines: disassembling and decommissioning obsolete cluster munitions for the US military.
Roboticists keep saying that robots are there for jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. The best robots are busy doing at least two out of three of those things at once, and the disassembly and recycling of thousands of M26 rockets (about 700,000 bomblets) seems like it would definitely qualify as dull, and mostly likely also qualify as dangerous several times over.
Here’s to the brave Sandia Labs-programmed robots at the Multiple Launch Rocket System Recycle Facility at the Anniston Munitions Center in Alabama — may they never unionize.