iPhones for Robots
There is a continually accelerating trend in the world today, although fairly obvious, most people probably haven’t really come to grips with it. The improvements of automated technology have made more and more jobs obsolete, and this is just the beginning. The trend seems to be on an exponential path, and yet the main stream media seems to not make mention of it.
A long time ago, in the era of my grandfather, people were once employed to make the elevator go up and down, and telephone operators were needed to connect you to other people. These days of course other than you pressing some buttons, both the elevators and phones are completely automated. Are you old enough to remember when you used to have to go see a real live human bank teller to get your money out of the bank?
Farming has of course gone through similar transitions, the amount of work done by many dozens of people can now be done faster by a sole driver of one machine, and even that one driver could be replaced by a self driving vehicle these days.
Over the years, most people who used to work on the farm, have moved to the city to get work, no longer do they work to supply society with their needs, but spend most of their waking life creating documents which eventually get stuffed into filing cabinets where no one will ever read them again, or pushing some kind of product on the consumer.
Just as most farming jobs have become obsolete, the same type of thing has been going on with manufacturing jobs, as the robots are improving, the jobs they can do are getting more complex, in fact people are no longer needed in the modern factory at all, with today’s technology entire cars can actually be made by robots via 3D printing.
Though it took a long time to produce the plans for the first car, they can now be print out one after the other, 24 hours a day, with no sick days or holidays. The first car took forty-four hours to print, which may seem like a while, but imagine thousands of 3D printers going at the same time.
You might think that all the manufacturing of 3D printers would be lots of work for humans, however the printers amazingly enough, can replicate themselves, or even make larger or smaller versions of themselves, who then again can scale upwards or downwards.
In theory you can now order a car from a website, and it could then drive itself right to your house to pick you up. No human needed.
The same thing of course is going on with every other manufacturing business from clothing to iPhones. Even the age old job warfare is being replaced by robots
Rather than shopping malls, and sales clerks, websites now sell products, and robots can sort and ship them.
Once pretty much all these jobs are taken by robots, then there are of course no need for managers, accountants, bookkeepers, or really any office job at all. The robots just need to be told once what to do, and away they go. Nothing to manage there. The selling, and management of the sales, money transfers, tax and everything else can all be handled by computers.
So what exactly would a human be needed for in the ultra modern world then? Other than the initial deigning of new products, not very much. Although currently over seventy percent of jobs seem to be of no use to society anyhow.
The old idea was that for every bit of automation we created, from washing machines to vending machines we could all enjoy more free time, that the machines would continually free us from the menial task of daily life and create paradise. However most people these days who do have work, are working harder and longer than ever just to keep a roof over their heads.
As most of the once important blue collar jobs become obsolete, people are being forced to move into white collar positions, but the transition is not easy for many, and they end up soon going broke, which can lead to desperation, and the desperation can lead to crime. Crime of course leads to more crime enforcement, and often jail for many.
Once all the blue collar jobs are gone, most white collar jobs will follow.
It makes me wonder if the people who rule our societies have any sort of long term plan for the future of humanity, it seems to me that they do not. In a very capitalist type of society such as the US, automating all aspects of consumerism may seem like good business sense, in the short term the profits will be immense. However as robotics continue to improve, and as 3D printers keep replicating themselves and are programmed to make more and more things. Who exactly will have a paying job to be able to afford the things they sell?
I have spoken before of my wishes for the future of society, that I believe we should have some sort of new Renaissance, and new era of art, music, entertainment and creativity, but what I didn’t realize is that at that point we were in the middle of a small one, before spring of 2012, many people could actually make a living on the internet, good writers, artists and other sorts of entertainers were able to post things on blogs and social media, which friends would share, people would read them, possibly click on an advertisement along the way, and people were rewarded for their creativity. Things were pretty good back then, however during 2011-2012, things changed, most social media website who’s stocks were publicly traded got bought up by people who had other things in mind, namely directing people to their own news websites and stores, those who resisted found themselves under extreme pressure. The unedited streams of Facebook, Digg and the like became heavily edited, big business hijacked the social media, and search engine results became more Big Business oriented as well. Many popular blogs on publicly hosted blogging networks were quietly deleted by their big business friendly hosts around that time, all the writers work was lost, and many bloggers suddenly found themselves without an income, the blog sharing networks were also of course hurt, most blogging networks suffered great financial losses during this time, some of them lost the ability to use advertising from the large companies who had essentially hijacked the internet at this time, one of the biggest blogging networks of the time Blogger went out of business completely. Most internet based small businesses also disappeared around this time, or soon after.
It seems to me that in the future most jobs positions will be held by robots.
Again I ask “Who exactly will have a paying job to be able to afford the things they sell?”
In the future are they going to try and market iPhones to Robots?
EDIT: The robotic farmers have now arrived.
New Boston Dynamics video
