Monday, November 21, 2011

Oz Never Did Give Nothing to the Tin Man

Robots. Yeah, they're getting better. Lots of time and money and brain power going into making robots better and better. Ya don't hear much about it, but it's happening. Quietly. Behind the scenes. Toyota's all over it. So are a bunch of pother companies. Which begs the question: why? Why do we need a robot that closely approximates a human being? Why is such a thing really necessary? I mean, look, outside of the realm of the science fiction film where robots make outstanding plot devices, has anyone come up with a really compelling reason to spend a gazillion dollars and millions of man-hours designing a mechanical man...or woman? Oh, sure, folks will come back and talk about how robots can be used to fight fires and go into nuclear reactors and so on and so forth. But really, how many robots would it REALLY require for that? A couple of thousand...world wide. Next you'll tell me that robots can do all of those really nasty, tedious, and dangerous jobs that humans do now and would rather not do. I'm sorry, is this a good idea? As it stands now, in this country alone, almost 10% of the work force cannot find work, in part because a lot of the nasty, tedious and dangerous jobs that humans used to do are now being done by machines. See, the idea was that the machines would do these jobs and that would free up the people to do more meaningful and fulfilling work. Yeah, like that happened. In reality, we just threw the people out of their jobs. Now they're all working at McDonalds and WalMart. Yeah, there's some fulfilling and meaningful work there. But what's a human to do? We want to build more machines that will do more of those jobs. Robots are coming. They got a robot that plays the violin now. Look out Yo Yo Ma. I suppose next they'll come up with a robot that does technical writing. 86 on all of the technical writers. Science fiction is upon us. Now all we have to do is figure out how the rest of us are going to make a living when the robots take away the rest of our jobs.

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