In a world where there are developments of robots created for sex, to be lawyers, and just answer our questions, all of us will be unemployed in the next 15 years.

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Or 30 years, or 50 years, or any other random amount of time the next quasi-sci-fi journalist, scientist, or futurist cares to guess.

And by unemployed, I mean freed of doing mundane soul sucking work.

With this freedom, and all freedom, comes fear.

What are we going to do for money?

I don’t know.

Same thing we have always done. Find an agreed upon unit to value and exchange. Something say, like steem...

Also, we will be able to find other jobs.

Life on the Mississippi is a fascinating book by Mark Twain. It explores his journey to learn the Mississippi river and the highly skilled job of being a steamboat pilot. Parts of the story are arduous to get through, but interesting nonetheless.

I bring this up to say, sadly, steamboat pilots are no longer needed.

Robots took their jobs.

Computer navigation systems aid in the traversing on the river.

But imagine instead of incorporating this new technology, we as a country decided to protect the jobs of steamboat pilots. Heck instead of just protecting their jobs, let's create 200,000 more riverboat pilot positions.

That would be a heavy investment that we would have to protect if we ever wanted to see a return on the sunk capital.

And sunk we would be.

We would have to stifle advancements in other shipping industries as well to keep river boat pilots protected.

We could call it the River Boat Pilot Protection Act or RBPA for short.

Otherwise, there would be competing methods of transportation that did, using technology, progress and reduced the cost of shipping. Think 18-wheelers over horses.

Speaking of truck drivers, they are one of the highly likely to be replaced by robots positions in the near-ish future.

“The brave new world of robots and lost jobs” by David Ignatius envisions “a world in which driverless vehicles replace most truck drivers’ jobs, and where factories are populated by robots, not human beings.”

And he is not the only one to talk about the potential future of relieving truck drivers of their work.

Although, the displacement of drivers is hard on them individually, I think, as humans, we are capable of more creative and meaningful pursuits.

Pursuit being the key.

It is an active chance to find meaning through the trial and error of different means of earning. It pushes people beyond the simple exchange of time and effort for money. It is a trade of talents or goods, or anything we can create to fit the bill.

But it’s work.

This future with the common jobs we now have replaced with automation will require new learning, new development, and new creativity.

Ignatius, as well as others, go on to suggest that it is not only factory or driver jobs that will be replaced.

“…60 percent of occupations could soon see machines doing 30 percent or more of the work.”

And:

“…research noting that “middle-skill” employees, such as bookkeepers, clerks and assembly-line workers, have been replaced first, but that “big data and machine learning will make it possible to automate many tasks that were difficult to automate in the past.” ”

David Ignatius also briefly brings up the idea of universal basic income (UBI), which is a trendy buzz word. He probably just put it in for SEO.

I want to mention that I have read a little about Universal Basic Income and conceptually like the idea, but don’t think the real world application would work.

Humans don’t act rationally.

And what is “necessary” or “basic” depends on location and local economies. That’s why the cost of living varies across the United States from higher costs in places like New York and California, to lower cost in Oklahoma. But then you have to live in Oklahoma…

Obviously, I am not going to win anyone in favor of UBI to giving it up, nor am I trying to. Rather I would like further clear information about how to solve some of the issues that it presents.

Rob Tracinski wrote that The Basic Income Is the Worst Response to Automation

Rob had this to say:

“We are told that the basic income will be "the only way to keep the country's economy afloat" in an age of automation, or that it will be necessary to absorb millions of truckers thrown out of middle-class jobs by the advent of autonomous vehicles.”

“The best response is to encourage people to respond to technological progress and to seek out the new jobs that will become available as the old ones fade away. Yes, automation is going to disrupt the economy, just as technological progress has always disrupted the economy, continually, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But helping people to adjust by putting them on a permanent welfare subsidy is the worst and cruelest response, precisely because it pays them not to adapt to the new economy.”

“There is nothing really new about the technological claims in favor of a basic income. The fear that new technology would put people out of work permanently, as well as the promise that it would make it possible for us to live in a utopia of uninterrupted plenty without the necessity of toil—these claims are as old as the Industrial Revolution itself. They have been made for every previous advance in technology, long before autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence.”

“Inspired by the industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen, they thought that the new production methods of the Industrial Revolution would make it possible to create a socialist utopia in which everyone could be provided equally with all the needs of life.”

“This theory keeps failing in practice, but it keeps getting resurrected each time industrial technology gets just new enough to make it seem vaguely plausible again.”

One last conclusion quote from Rob:

“Well, one of the lessons is that no matter how sophisticated the system, no matter how advanced our machines seem to be, relative to what we're used to, somebody still needs to do the work of keeping them running. We need someone to monitor them, maintain them, and regulate them, someone who understands how they work and how they connect to other systems. … Yet this entire industry is new and was entirely unimagined by the people who, back in 1964, thought their imaginary "cybernated" system was just going to run itself. The downside of this, if you want to view it that way, is that work is still necessary. The upside is that work is still necessary and is far more productive and therefore higher-paying. The average annual income for tech industry workers is about $100,000.”

Or two...

“The conceit behind these proposals is that workers will use the safety net of the basic income to give them time to acquire new skills and adapt. But if you actually follow the arguments of the advocates of the basic income, not having to work at all is something they regard as a major feature of the new system. … ”

Rob Tracinski ends with:

So the basic income, as an economic program, is a plan to lure a large group of people into withdrawing from the economy and living in a state of economic helplessness and stagnation, separate from a technological elite who enjoy wealth and influence. It is not exactly the progressive utopia it pretends to be.

And do you know what the really perverse part is? That it is all unnecessary. This is an attempt to lure people into a dead end of idleness precisely in response to new technology which offers them greater opportunities than they have ever had before. (Emphasis added).

I share all this to get people to think beyond the simple acceptance of UBI just because it sounds cool to not have to work ever again.

Lastly, I want to end with a discussion from Steven Pinker - Professor of Psychology at Harvard University:

His article, with an accompanying video, asserts “AI Won't Takeover the World, and What Our Fears of the Robopocalypse Reveal”.

“Pinker believes an alpha male thinking pattern is at the root of our AI fears, and that it is misguided.”

“In reality we design AI, and if we place safeguards in our designs, we truly have nothing to fear. Machines are what we allow them to be. The dread of them turning evil really says more about our own psyches than it does about robots.”

The contention is that somehow AI overrides these safeguards in design and then we are at their mercy.

Although, based on NO research or understanding of the issue whatsoever, I don’t think it is likely to happen that we end up with robot overlords.

Dilbert creator, author/blogger, Scot Adams has suggested the “Law of Slow-Moving Disasters” which basically says that when given a long enough head start of a tip off of a problem, humanity has “risen to the challenge” and found viable solutions to our problems preventing disaster.

Remember the death and destruction from Y2K?

Nope.

Because it didn’t happen.

That is one of a few examples Scott brings up to support his law.

I bring this up to point out that although conceivably the robots could take over, I think we all have it at the forefront of our consciences and will work on appropriate methods to prevent this.
We shall see.

Maybe we need to start advocating for robot rights, you know, just in case…

What do you think about all this? Let me know what I got wrong and what I accidently got right, because is bologna even meat?

@strangerarray