"The questions that we are raising here are profound. How do we prevent this downward spiral from happening? Are we smart enough to see the robotic revolution that is coming and plan for it prior to the crisis? Can we redesign the economy so that we enter the new era of robots smoothly? With robots doing most of the work, can we actually create a society that takes advantage of the leisure that robots can provide? Or will the tens of millions of people displaced by the robots end up being homeless and destitute, living in government welfare dormatories?"
This isn't all that different from the transition from a manufacturing economy to an information economy that's been going on for a long time. It hurt the economy a hell of a lot worse to lose middle class manufacturing job than it's going to hurt losing lowest-common-denominator fast food jobs, which are the jobs at the most risk.
The more a job requires actual judgement, the less at risk it is. And indeed, I expect there will be plenty of supervision and maintenance jobs in the workplaces that transition to automation -- people will be much better at exception handling than machine systems for the foreseeable future.
From: http://marshallbrain.com/robots-in-2015.htm