Relax, Wage Slaves -- Robots Promise You an Endless Vacation
Vacation is true freedom. It's as close as we get to the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ideal of the Declaration of Independence.
What if you had that sort of freedom every day? We should be considering this possibility because we are now standing on the threshold of the robotic revolution. Primitive robots are already taking jobs all around us. The automated gas pumps and supermarket checkout lines are the leading edge of a robotic revolution in the workplace. And the revolution is about to accelerate rapidly.
Computer technology has been advancing steadily for the last 40 years, doubling speed and memory every 18 months in a process known as Moore's Law. If you simply extrapolate these trends, you find that desktop computers will have capabilities equal to that of the human brain by 2040 or so. As computing power finally reaches parity with the human brain and then begins to exceed it, robots will become more and more human in terms of intelligence, visual recognition and language processing.
For many millenniums, Earth has been the home of a single intelligent species. Humans are now engineering the second one. It will take only a handful of breakthroughs to open the floodgates of the robotic revolution, and intelligent robots will directly compete with humans for jobs. As time passes, the new species will get better and better, cheaper and cheaper.
Robots will start performing every essential task in the 2040 time frame. They will grow, package and transport all of the food we eat. Robots will build all of the housing we live in. Robots will manufacture and sell all consumer products. In 1903, when the Wright brothers' first rickety airplane took to the air, it was impossible to imagine that the B-52 bomber would be able to fly halfway around the world carrying 70,000 pounds of bombs just 50 year later. In the same way, it is impossible for us to imagine robots taking all the jobs in today's economy in 2050. Yet they will. Robots in the workforce are as inevitable as jet aircraft were.
With robots doing the work, we should all be on perpetual vacation. Unfortunately, in the structure of our current economy, that is not what will happen.
We may see massive unemployment, with robots taking so many jobs that millions of unemployed humans end up in government welfare dormitories. Or perhaps we will create mundane new jobs to replace the old ones. The third option is the revolutionary one: What if we let the robots have the jobs, while we all attain actual economic freedom for the first time in human history?
