Last week, there was this multibillionaire warning the world that the job market will be taken over by ROBOTS! It sounds like a joke, and I think we as a people are hard pressed to believe such a thing, but this mutlibillionaire is adamant about it. This man, is Bill Gates, and it’s hard not to just toss aside what this man has to say. A man who helped make Windows a household name, not just a wall to look out of, Bill Gates is warning governments, businesses, and everyone who’s willing to listen, that many of the jobs we take for granted, will be taken over by robots.
When I first read the article from Business Insider, I freaked out. I mean, I work in IT, and I can be next! Computers that fix themselves. Not to mention all the self sufficient stories out there like grocery stores. There are supermarkets where you just check out the food yourself! Which is not only convenient and keeps me from having to be social, even minimally so, but it’s one less human worker. There’s self serve check out stands and there are iPods that take your menu choices at sit down restaurants. Hell, we have Roombas that will clean your floor for you. It seems the writing’s been on the wall this whole time, and we just kind of laugh it off because we think we’ll always have work, and the world will always be this way.
I’m not trying to panic myself here (but I am), but it’s a strange thought to think that we as humans will one day, soon, be “served” by AI and robots and tablets. Google bought robotics companies and are creating self driving cars. Honda made a robot that could run. We have AI-ish programs like Siri and Cortana. We have search engines that do math for us. We even have robots solving Rubik’s cubes so fast, you won’t have time to wonder why the hell it was invented in the first place!
Not to mention robot fish. So when is this robot apocalypse supposed to happen? Bill Gates estimates it’s 20 years, some commenters think it’s earlier than that. I think it’s freaking scary!
The moment I read the article, I had to go around the web to find out if people were as concerned as I was. People were talking about the possible future like Star Trek or Elysium, about the super rich and the depressingly poor. There was talk of living wages and working on our talents and skills and using that as our contribution to society. Out of all the theories, the mind sets, and the reasoning, my favorite idea so far is the idea of living in a Star Trek world. I often daydreamed, from when I was a kid until now, of living in this weird Star Trek Utopian society. A world where you can just board a star ship and travel the universe, discovering new life and new civilizations, and boldly go all sorts of places. Sure you have to fear for your life when you encounter the Borg, but then you have replicators that can create your food, and holodecks that can let you live out any and every fantasy. Disease isn’t really a thing, because we have medicine so advanced, that you can recover in TV time (in like, a couple of hours instead of days). Humans seemed happy, and thin, and educated. My only problem would be the unitards.
If our future looks like what Gene Roddenberry envisioned, then I’m all for it. But the more people I talk to about this, the more they emphasize that we’re a selfish, greedy people by nature and we’ll all probably end up in an Elysium scenario. The wealthy and privileged business owners will live in their own paradise and the average Joe, who still has to do the manual labor that robots can’t do, stay on the devastated part of Earth. When it comes to the future, the majority of people I’ve spoken with, are not optimists. Maybe they’re realists, but I’d like to think that in the future, we’ll all be happy, peaceful and put together people, no matter our background or socioeconomic status.
Will the dawn of the robot revolution make us a lazier society, more interested in reality TV than bettering ourselves? Will our new robot overlords improve our lives in a way to where we can stop working because we have to work and actually do things that we love and still contribute to society? Will anything change at all? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Only time will tell. One thing’s for sure. I don’t think enough people care about or know what’s going on in our possible AI and robotic filled future. In general, I think we’re kind of cool just sticking to our old ways of thinking, or being ignorant, or worse, being apathetic. We like thinking nothing will change, and life will always be this way.
