The Robots Are Coming!
In the 1960s, sci-fi authors projected a robotic future for humanity. Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite ones in the genre, devoted his Robot series to the topic. It actually became one of his inspirations. I admired his other books on the theme: The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, both featuring human-like robots and people interacting in our future.
Asimov’s genius extended beyond plain storytelling. He ventured into the realm of theory, crafting his Three Laws of Robotics, a concept that found its way into many of his works. These laws, first introduced in his Handbook of Robotics, 56th edition, 2058 AD, were designed to ensure the usefulness of robots while eliminating any potential for them to become a threat.b
Returning to our reality, I think that even in 2058, we won’t live in a future like Asimov had dreamed of.
On the other hand, we now have plenty of robotic technology incorporated into our lives. These folks are not always humanoid creatures. For example, plenty of programs are used in social media, and various online applications that are known as bots. They are also some kind of virtual software robots. This intangible tribe can post your publication at a fixed time and date, check your grammar, and much more!
Even Asimov couldn’t imagine such robots! Reality moves in the direction he projected but in a different shape. That’s OK, as he was a scientist and visionary, not a future teller.
By 2058, those who would inherit our world of 2024 would be living in a completely different environment… full of robots!
But we will still be the bosses with robots serving us.
Are robots about to take over?
Elon Musk needs, needs, a fifty-billion dollar bonus from Tesla. He needs the money so badly that if he can’t get it under Delaware law, he wants to relocate Tesla to Texas. He deserves this money, just ask him.
Tesla stock is doing as poorly as their profits. Sales are down. Things are so bleak that they have been forced to lay off employees. Company leadership says the people at Tesla need to be hard core. I assume that means everybody not named Elon.
The one-percent are completely disconnected from society. Because humans want food and water, they cost too much money. Money that could be better directed to corporate dividends. The obvious answer is to get rid of the whiney-assed humans.
To this end, as you read this, Tesla is testing humanoid robots to replace the humans. Robots are being taken to the factory floor and trained by people who will then be fired. Once the people show the robots how to do their jobs the humans can go to hell. As long as they do it in a Tesla.
The Chinese, never to be outdone, are also introducing androids into factories in order to fire humans. Elon says he wants to make one billion robots. I’m sure China has similar ideas.
This is not happening in ten or twenty years, it’s here, now. Obviously, our Adam Smith-style capitalist system will not survive such a massive disruption to the labour market. Unlike past revolutions, nobody is moving from the farm to the factory. The rich will resist any attempt to tax their robots and I believe they will be successful for quite some time. It’s an uncomfortable subject if you’re a politician because the people who finance political campaigns will not like where this all ends. Best we not talk about it.
Without proper taxation and wealth redistribution, there will be serious social upheaval. Let’s be clear: people without jobs or a future will become violent. If half the entire population has nothing to lose, what do you think will happen?
Are robots about to take over?
Yes, of course, and they already are, much of the time with us all not even able to tell. But wait a minute, isn’t that the end of humanity as we know it? Only if you believe those cheap Hollywood movies, that will tell you the end of the world is nigh…….
Yes, the world, again, is changing, rapidly, but guess what? We will deal with it. We, the human race, always have. Because it has happened again and again, many times, for centuries.
The mother of all job killers in humanity was agriculture. Up-to-date AI could not even emulate the “chaos” that agriculture created. Remember, once upon a time, our only job was to look for food. Like all animals that was the only thing we had to do.
Then we began to sow wild seeds. And before long, food production became a much easier thing. A single farmer in a few acres of land could produce more food than dozens of hunters attacking many square miles of forest. This gave rise to the harrowing thing called civilization. We were all doomed.
So instead, we invented stuff like pottery, painting, homes building and drainage, ending up with administration, mining, jewellery, accounting, and of course medicine…
Sometime later, us doomed humans started to manage the power of steam and create “nasty” things like steam engines. Rather than beating our horses to get to the next village, we would get to the other end of the continent drinking fine wine on the Orient Express.
People younger than me don’t realise that in the recent past, we had jobs like copy typists. If you spelt a word wrong using your trusty typewriter, you had to destroy it, and start again, using new paper. How could we ever replace these, predominately women? But we did, Easily. The age of word processors changed the working environment, but we coped. As we always do.
According to the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs Report 2020,” AI is expected to replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025. Though that sounds somewhat insane, the report goes on to say that it will also create 97 million new jobs in that same timeframe.
Yes, robots will change the environment in which we live to a huge extent, and yes, they may “take over”, but not to the detriment of the human race. We are a resilient mob and history says we will not only survive, but will flourish, probably in ways that we do not yet comprehend.