A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end.
Although robots will replace jobs in the future, it is not already happening on the mass scale some would like us to believe. Companies have been firing workers back home and shipping jobs to countries where labor is pennies on the dollar. They are not using ‘robots’ for those jobs yet because the labor cost is still so low, but I keep hearing the robot argument whenever people show the destruction of manufacturing jobs back home.
Using labor in countries that are dictatorships is always going to be cheaper than in countries that are free. But corporate profits trump everything, right? Who cares about our principles, I mean, is using slave labor that much better than using child labor? And, no, don’t try to bullshit us into thinking it’s robots that are really taking our jobs.
But this article does show what will happen if we sit back idly and continue to let corporations rule society and make our laws. While corporate profits are through the roof, wages have gone nowhere over the past 40 years due to corporations hiring, what’s in essence, “slave” labor. When there is a shift to robots, we can only imagine what will happen then!
Even Stephen Hawking recently warned that we need to start preparing for this eventuality today.
But first, we need to ask ourselves the following questions:
- Do corporations exist solely for corporate profits?
- Even when those profit goals violate core beliefs and the laws of a society
- Even when those profits ONLY go to the corporations and a few rich people at the top?
- Even when the corporations use those riches to control the very governments that were created to prevent things like this from happening?
- Can corporations exist to also provide jobs for society?
- As they used to at one prosperous point in our history?
We are already seeing the effects of belief number 1 in today’s world. People are waking up to the problem which is why TPP & TTIP are getting so much backlash. But we really need to address this problem head-on today because fighting for the rights of people is a lot easier today while people are still needed. Rules can be put in place so that the people will also participate in man’s technological advances.
Remember, when employees of corporations make money, the employees have more money to spend buying corporations’ products and everyone benefits, the rich AND the regular people. It’s a win/win situation. The shift to corporate profits ONLY has been a win/lose situation, and guess who’s been on the losing side? It’s time to get back to a world where everyone benefits again.
But if we wait too long, only the corporations will be the beneficiaries of our technological advances and there will not be much need for people at all, which could make being on the losing side even more detrimental than imagined. And we have to start preparing for this change today while humans are still needed. Once humans are no longer needed, we lose our power to negotiate and this will be the work day we have to look forward to:
As Stephen Hawking said:
“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.
So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
Source: Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’
