Once again, I'm glad to be old, after reading
this article in Mother Jones about machines taking our jobs.
Right-wingers, of course, never worry about the future, either global warming or the threat of automation. They still grind old horses, abortion, gays, marijuana, blacks, Jews, and other religions. All important issues, no doubt, but what about a world that is too hot? What about a world where there are no jobs?
I'll be dead before robots take over, I think. So, this is something the younger people will have to deal with. I really doubt they are capable of rising to the challenge, because they let Trump get in and don't seem to really be doing much of anything to take control of the country. I see young people as doing just what they are told, meandering about, going with the flow just like their elders, and hoping against hope things get better on their own, although things won't. They are not wired to do what is needed to change anything. The elite have bred a global population that just goes along with the tides of change created by the elite and by technology. For better or worse, that is the way of the world.
First to go will be the drivers. No more uber, no more truckers, no more taxi, no more chauffeur, no more delivery, no more airline pilots or train drivers. Robot cars will drive everything. That is huge in itself, but then, no more receptionists, secretaries, clerks, and so on. There will be a ton of people jobless and incapable of ever getting a job in the first place, no matter how much training.
Mother Jones agonizes over what to do, what to do. A social program, they think, to give benefits and money to the jobless, a permanent and persistent class of jobless, mind you, simply for doing nothing? Oh yeah? How long will that last? I just don't see that happening. There is no free lunch.
Meanwhile, the right-wingers don't care. They don't care about anything, seems like, except ghosts from the past, old axes to grind, against the gays, or marijuana, or women. I imagine they'd like a war and lots of people to die.
It does seem likely that war will break out quite often in the future, as joblessness spans the globe and billions of people are left in poverty and even starvation. I think that robots will be unleashed to deal with the situation and exterminate vast numbers of rebels. The human population, one way or another, will have to decline by 90 to 99 per cent, in order to accommodate a jobless future, where there is no way to earn a living, and humans are simply obsolete.
The only survivors will be the smartest and, more importantly, the richest, who will use the new genetic technology to craft ever more-capable versions of H. Sapiens, disease-resistant, extremely intelligent, strong, thin, obesity-resistant, and longer-lived. Robots will be unleashed to deal with the unhappy, starving multitudes.
Perhaps this is why China refuses to embrace democracy. Their leaders foresee a future where most of the population must die. Not only must most people die, but the survivors must not reproduce. They must have the capability of reproduction removed altogether, in fact. Reproduction in the future will be a crime, punishable by death.
Any other solution runs into the problem of national diversity. If we try to craft a gentler world in the United States, say, other nations will go the more expedient route, and they will gain the advantage. There is no world government, so in the end, what is expedient will win. We see this now. Republicans know. The social safety net of the West is imperiled, and I see nothing but more suffering for ordinary citizens in the future, which will be darker and crueler, with much pain, disease and misery. The reason is that all our jobs can be exported to China for cheap labor or else replaced by robots, so the Western worker is of little value anymore and might as well let him suffer and die, is the brutal logic employed by the masters. There is really not a way of preventing this trend without giving a huge advantage to nations like China and Russia that just don't care about their own workers in the first place. The absence of a functioning world government means that whatever is expedient, wins. This was the chief failure of H. Sapiens, to come together as a single species. Perhaps the future species will possess more of a sense of community and belonging.
Unfortunately, there just isn't a place for people, at least our current species, in the future. People are just too lame. Computers are smarter than we are. Robots are faster, stronger, and longer-lasting. No one alive today can compete with a robot at a specific skill set, at least the robot of the future, after the technology has been refined. It is possible, with a ton of genetic engineering, that a faster, stronger, smarter human can be cooked up in the laboratory, but that's still a long way off, and even then, the future race will probably be an amalgam of both computer and organism.
Killing off the humans solves two problems: no more threat of nuclear war, because the ones remaining will be too smart to mess around with nukes--and no more climate change, because the ultimate cause of climate change is too many people. Although it is an evil to eliminate 99.9% of the human race, in the end, those that remain will have a paradise at their feet, with minimal pollution and endless potential. The main cause of problems in the world is simply too many human beings of little intelligence and little value. They cause trouble with terrorism, warfare, violent crime, corruption, pollution, cruelty to themselves and to the animals, and meanwhile they keep reproducing like mad, because that is all they know how to do, and in the end, they are like rabbits, no better, no worse. There really is no way of persuading people not to reproduce. The way to reduce the human population remains the time-honored, traditional method, through warfare. It may even be that nuclear war on a vast scale is deployed, with an end to preserving certain outposts below the surface of the earth that will allow the elite to survive. North Korea, in fact, already foresees this and invites it, as does Russia and the U.S. and very likely, China. In these nations, secret little headquarters stacked with supplies, weapons and technology exist where the elite can endure decades if need be until the threat of nuclear contamination subsides on the surface of the earth.
Already the future is foreshadowed by the deployment of drones against Islamic barbarians and the invention of the self-driving Tesla. In the future, automated robots will patrol the earth, seeking rebels to destroy. Had we drones in sufficient quantities, we could have taken care of Afghanistan within a year. Of course, drones will only get cheaper to produce over time, as their manufacture becomes increasingly automated. In the future, our soldiers will be robots. The first side to run out of robots, loses.
