Canon PowerShot S100
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5.2 mm
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Our beleaguered Robot Dawn trying to serve as mix-master for the DFJ Growth team’s close…
So many happy campers, she can’t keep up.
5 responses to “Happy Cinco de Mayo”
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Robots have a great future… as Chinese workers demand better pay and better working conditions they’ll be replaced by robots, idem sooner than later Cambodia and Vietnam too, and even the poor, squashed b*ggers in Bangladesh will be replaced by robots, if they get too "shirty".
My question is finally, who will be around to buy the stuff the robots produce?
Is India — a few brilliant, well-off, geeks surrounded by masses of "under-achieving", walking skeletons — the future awaiting us all?
I feel like, you know, like when a cucumber salad you ate a couple of days ago repeats… A Marxist scenario we studied back in the 60s: our system gets more and more perfect, but people get poorer and poorer and finally the whole thing explodes. It didn’t make much sense back then. That was back then…
The old guy who dreamed that up said that then when it happened, we would all live happily ever after… That is the part I’ve never been sure of. The first part seems to be happening right before our eyes
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@David Seaton — you might like the Techcrunch series on peak jobs and post-scarcity society.
I am more interested in the future of meaningful work than the dearth of meaningless jobs. As a sweeping overgeneralization, happiness comes from finding purpose and meaning that transcends the self (i.e., the symbolic immorality from creating something that lasts beyond our time, such as entrepreneurship, art, philanthropy, offspring or belief in the afterlife). We should expect that repetitive movements are not well suited for lifetime employment – the body can’t keep up in many cases. The globalization of information work seems like the more impactful trend in the long term, for these are the jobs we want, and if they lose the shelter of regional competition, the opportunities for impact, and income, may shift to a steep power law, disenfranchising the vast majority of people.
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No, I think you have it. Perhaps I am overgeneralizing a bit, but if we consider the set of tasks that are purely repetitive, I am assuming that people do this because they need a job, not because they have found a higher meaning or purpose in that particular task. And yes, they would bore of it. I assume this is why most factory workers surveyed do not wish their children to have the same job. These jobs can be enriched in various ways to keep people going for longer, but the underlying task at hand, so to speak, has already been mechanized by the surrounding work context to be devoid of fulfilling cognition or a human expression of artistry.
It’s almost a tautology that the tasks that the robots of this era can do are precisely those that no human would wish to do. And looking to the future, the substitutions we should focus on are AIs that replace activities that we find fulfilling and paradoxically, challenge our over-retreating sense of what it means to be truly human.
So, back to the topic of the globalization of information work and the resulting power laws… I read an interesting essay last night in Smolan’s The Human Face of Big Data:
“We inhabit an interesting time in the history of humanity, where a small number of people, numbering not more than a few hundred, but really more like a few dozen, mainly living in cities like San Francisco and New York, mainly male, and mainly between the ages of 22 and 35, are having a hugely outsized effect on the rest of our species.
Through the software they design and introduce to the world, these engineers transform the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people. Previously, this kind of mass transformation of human behavior was the sole domain of war, famine, disease, and religion, but now it happens more quietly, through the software we use every day, which affects how we spend our time, and what we do, think, and feel.
In this sense, software can be thought of as a new kind of medicine, but unlike medicine in capsule form that acts on a single human body, software is a different kind of medicine that acts on the behavioral patterns of entire societies.
The designers of this software call themselves “software engineers”, but they are really more like social engineers. Through their inventions, they alter the behavior of millions of people, yet very few of them realize that this is what they are doing, and even fewer consider the ethical implications of that kind of power.”
— Jonathan HarrisAnd for a more futuristic, if light-hearted perspective, we turn to Neal Stephenson:
"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brick maker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery"
— Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash -
and now he knows if he has been a bad robot: finance.yahoo.com/news/this-robot-knows-when-it-screws-up…
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