G’day,
Flippy the robotic hamburger flipper recently launched at a US restaurant - a vaguely humanoid robot that can flip a patty when needed and start the burger creation process.
Whilst there’s been some teething problems, its creators intend to have a Flippy installed in numerous restaurants in the near future. They claim however that this machine will not see the loss of jobs for humans - merely assist them. In all honesty - if machines can soon make a Big Mac by themselves, can you honestly imagine McDonalds continuing to employ as many staff?
This is a growing trend with great AI and robotics advances pushing more and more people out of their jobs.
Even in my own role - finance - systems can now download your bank statement and process the information - assign incoming payments to the appropriate debtor accounts, code transactions against the correct General Ledger codes, etc etc.
[In fact - I’ve contributed to the process myself - creating tools in Excel that can expedite processes that previously took hours per week down to just the click of a button…]
Whilst civilisation basically began when our ancestors reached the point of having - gasp - spare time, allowing them to sit down and do some serious thinking about Life, the Universe, and, well, Everything… In today’s mostly capitalistic world, whilst doubtless these new changes will ultimately resolve their way into a new norm, I can’t see us reaching that point without a great deal of suffering as people are made redundant from jobs no one previously thought could be automated, as governments then deal with the issue of re-tooling their economies to find a new niche to contribute to the New World.
I’m starting to understand how the Luddites felt.
cheers
cosmic