Robots

 

"Quick, spill a packet of Skittles™ on the floor..."

 

"Oh noes, it's counting down the hairs on my head!"

 

"Don't worry, since you are a very hairy fellow we have plenty of time to make our escape."

The company I work for has been developing a very advanced robot for many years and we commonly joke that it will eventually use it to substitute many of us without receiving complaints, without getting ill and without having to deal with Unions. The problem is that we wonder if we are really joking or predicting the future 

Sure, that was the utopian dream! the problem is that this is not how it works, robots and automatization in general did not just release humans from the heavy work and improved their life by doing so. Those who 'own' the 'robots' (generalise as 'machines') benefit from their higher efficiency and lack of social issues for performing the work but those who used to perform the work before do not get any clear benefit from the introduction of those machines. Sure, the 'population' or 'we the consumers' benefit from their ability to produce goods and services at lower cost than humans do, so in paper it feels like this is a positive thing, but is it so? do we really prefer a world where a yoghurt cost us 1.00 euro and 25% of the population is unemployed, or a world where a yoghurt cost 1.20 euro and we all have a job? (I'm obviously exaggerating and over-simplifying).

If you think that machines allow humans to work less time you are wrong for the most cases, at least that is what experience tells us so far. Less physically heavily perhaps, but less time or with less stress, no. Of course the target might be that by employing machines to do the heaviest part of the work, humans can spend their time in other (presumably more noble) tasks, but given the nature of economics it is very hard to imagine that this will ever be the case.

Utopia is always just over the next hill.

 

(As I hinted at before) Since the birth of the Industrial Revolution we have been slaves to the machine, just as Jethro Tull's seed drill enslaved us to the land rather than liberated us from it. Automation never released us from drudgery, it shackled us to the working day, we must work while the machines work and those machines never sleep - the automated production line did not result in a shorter working day, it created the shift system - we have a longer working day, a longer working week and a longer working year than our medieval ancestors - the reward for that is payment and that is the only incentive there is. (re-read what I posted before - this is the gist of what I said - the working day is a disease we are inflicted with).

 

Fully autonomous robots that can truly replace a human (and not the automated machines that we currently call "robots") will liberate us, though the socio-economic revolution that will result from that will not be pretty nor easily achieved - every ideology, every sociology and every philosophy we currently hold so dear will resist this change, probably more violently than any 19th century Luddite or 16th century Saboteur.

 

One thing we cannot halt is the rise of the machines, how we manage that change is going to be the toughest challenge modern civilisation has ever faced .Empires will fall, nations will crumble, civilisation as we know it will change beyond all recognition, even beyond the wildest fantasies of any SF author.