I’ve been a big proponent of automation over the years. I recognise that automation will cause the loss of some jobs, but I’ve always assumed people would move on to other things. A consistent theme of mine was, why waste humans on mundane work when they could do something of more value?
I recently read The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov and now I feel rather uneasy about automation and AI…
I don’t want to give too much of the story away, but we are told fairly early that the planet Solaria only has 20,000 humans, and millions of robots. The robots do everything as far as the economy is concerned, and the humans are essentially idle custodians. Rather than having millions of people doing a variety of occupations, there are only the elite sitting at the top of the pile…
As I was reading this I was thinking about the economic elite on our planet and I started to feel some concern. My dream of a post-scarcity society is one where we are all equal, but I can’t imagine there are many people at the top that want to be equal. They would always want to be more than equal. Call me a pessimist, but when I think of Elon Musk calling himself the emperor of Mars, I wonder if a future post-scarcity society will be less like Star Trek, and more like Solaria…
Of course, the AI could just turn into Skynet and kill us all, but I have this feeling that greedy humans using AI and automation against the majority of the population poses the greater threat. Why have “them and us”, if there could just be “us”? 🙁
All of a sudden automation has lost some of its lustre…
Cheers
Tim…
40 yrs ago. Programmers will soon not be required anymore.
DBAs will soon be obsolete.