Poetry – Robots for good!

Posted on by Opher

Robots for good!

Let us bring in robots!

Do away with work!

Then quarter the population.

A new age of fairness and prosperity!

Let us have a new age

Of unity with nature,

Of reverence for all,

Of oneness with respect and dignity!

Opher 26.11.2019

The world is being ravaged by mankind. We are destroyed nature. Our greed and numbers are killing everything in our path.

Time to change.

Maybe AI can be a force for great good – if we harness it for the good of all, and not just the wealthy few, we can all become prosperous. We can work less.

But we will need to bring our numbers down so that our impact is less. Nature cannot stand the strain. We are changing the climate; we are causing extinctions on a catastrophic level.

Time to change.

AI could be the solution (or it could be the final straw).

Automation and A/I – a new world.

Posted on by Opher

We are on the brink of a new world. The future does not need an army of workers. They are fast becoming surplus to requirements.

Look at the jobs that are going to be replaced by automation:

drivers

shelf stackers

factory work,

deliverers

miners

brain surgeons

pilots

soldiers

bricklayers

Robots and automation will do both unskilled and skilled work.

In the present day the skilled workforce was kicked out of well-paid jobs in mining, shipyards, docks, building, steel works, car plants, factories. They were replaced by automation. A machine can work night and day and does not need paying. It is cheaper, more efficient and less troublesome. A manufacturer can make much higher profits.

Our docks are all container ports now. There are no stevedores shoveling coal or carrying sacks.

The displaced workforce were put out to work in low-paid menial tasks. They are now stacking shelves in supermarkets, flipping burgers, driving an uber or dashing around all over the country delivering parcels.

Soon those jobs will go. Driverless cars will soon be the norm. Deliveries will be made by robots. We already have self-stacking supermarkets with no need for a checkout. They have machines that lay bricks and robots that build cars. There are automated fast-food joints. Drones replace soldiers and people are blown up remotely. Robots do a better job. The product is done to perfection. They are more efficient, faster and better. They are also a lot cheaper.

I have been doing a daily walk up my hill past the fields and observing the huge fields either side of my lane.

A couple of hundred years ago these were small fields with hedges and streams. The village would have been involved in planting tending and harvesting. It was very labour intensive and inefficient (but fun). Now it is different.

A big tractor comes along and in one day it ploughs the whole massive field. After a while another big tractor discs it. A tractor comes along and sprays the field with fertiliser (the needs assessed from assays. A tractor would come along and sow the seeds. Every few weeks a tractor comes along and sprays the field with pesticide and herbicide. On the big day, when the crop is perfect, three massive machines come along and harvest the peas. I stood and watched (with memories of laboriously shucking peas with my grandmother). The machines chopped the plants, separated pods from plant and shucked the peas. A tractor with wagon rolled alongside the harvester and the peas were poured from a shoot into the wagon. The wagon drove off to the factory where they were frozen and packaged to be sent to the supermarket. The whole field was done in a morning.

What took a whole village could now be achieved by one man, part-time, and five men for a morning.

In a few years time even this will be automated. There will be no need for tractor drivers.

What struck me was that no pea was touched by human hand. The whole process of sowing, tending, harvesting, freezing, packaging and ending up in the shop is automated. The only time a pea touches a human is when the fork enters the mouth.

The end result of this automation is scary.

The manufacturers can produce more goods more cheaply and efficiently and make more money.

People are no longer needed. The workforce is redundant.

We end up with a two-tier world. The extremely rich manufacturers and a very poor underclass who cannot find work.

Something has to change.

New jobs will be made. Robots need tending to. There is design and innovation. Factories need overseeing. Computers need programming.

But a lot of these jobs require skills and intelligence. Not everybody is suited.

There are the caring and leisure industries and education. But even these will be affected by A/I. Distanced learning and robotic friends, arse-washing toilets and smart wheelchairs.

The model for capitalism is under threat. How can people buy the mass of things manufactured if they have no money?

This could lead to a world of pleasure and leisure or a world of two classes of people.

Which is it?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be paid handsomely for work and only had to work two or three days a week?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be trained to carry out caring jobs – nursing, caring for the elderly, looking after nature and teaching – which paid well and gave you plenty of time to prepare and have time off – with the money to do things.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a more equal society where the wealthy was more evenly distributed (on a global basis) so that everybody could proper from this new affluence?

Or is it going to end up with an extremely wealthy elite, greedily raking in the money while the rest of us live on peanuts?

What do you reckon?

A/I will change your life!

Posted on by Opher

The social models we are living in are dead.

Just as the industrial revolution swept away a way of life that had lasted centuries the A/I revolution will cause our way of life to be severed.

Back in the industrial revolution the rural way of life was swept away. The machines could do the work of many men. They were cheaper and more efficient. Millions moved off the land into the cities to get jobs in factories.

A/I will automate the factories, the mines, the car-plants, steelworks and shipyards.

It’s already happening.

The once well-paid workers are now working in supermarkets stacking shelves and serving customers or else zooming around the country delivering goods.

They have lost a career that was respected and gave their families a good standard of living for a zero-hours contract, uncertainty, low pay and no security.

But that is the tip of the ice-berg.

A/I will mean that robots become ever more sophisticated and will start taking over even the most skills jobs such as brain surgery or flying planes and they will do it with more skill than our present surgeons and pilots.

Our streets will be cleaned by machines, our planes flown by machines, our factories operated by machines.

Soon we will have driverless uber. We will have automated delivery, automated checking out, automated stacking, automated crop sowing and harvesting.

It is quite conceivable that a machine will sow seeds in a field the other side of the world. Another machine will harvest the crop. A driverless lorry will take the wheat seed to a factory where a machine will process it and package it. A driverless lorry will deliver it to a supermarket where an automatic shelf-stacker will place it on a shelf. An intelligent robot will check stock, note what is selling and order to restock as needed. You will order on line and a driverless delivery van will deliver your cereal to your door.

No human hand will be necessary in the entire operation. Even repairs and maintenance will be automated and carried out by machines.

No job will be secure. There will be even the most complex procedures carried out by machines – the money markets, health diagnostics, design, art, music, education. There is no job that will be unaffected, completely replaced or at least greatly impacted.

Even your lawn will be cut by a robot, your floors hoovered, clothes washed and windows cleaned.

Just think – we could end up with an effective government that is a machine! Some things might be a big improvement!

The Problem

The problem with this development is quite clear. The workforce will, for the first time in history, not be required. So what does society do with all these surplus people? What do the people do to ‘earn’ a living? What do we do with all our free time?

If we continue to follow our present model we end up with a gigantic inequality. The wealthy minority who own the farms, factories and retail outlets will maximise their profits and ‘earn’ a fortune. The workforce will firstly be working for peanuts and then thrown on the dole.

Countries will be thrown into chaos. Unemployment will be rife. The richer countries will try to retrain people for whatever new jobs are required – maybe in the caring professions. They will support people on the dole. The poorer countries will have mass starvation leading to mass immigration and desperate people.

The world will be divided into the super-rich and the desperate poor.

We are already beginning to see this. It has led to Brexit and Trump and a wave of fascism and populism.

It’s going to get a lot worse.

The Remedy

We have to move to a global perspective.

The wealthy have to be taxed to provide money for the rest. This would be for their own good as much as anyone else. This gross inequality is already creating much anger and hate. Soon that would be directed at the wealthy and result in violence.

There has to be a drastic shortening of working hours with job sharing.

There has to be education and training to produce a skilled workforce to carry out the jobs that will be created by A/I.

There has to be a move to moving people into the caring and leisure industries where human contact is more desirable – nursing, caring, teaching, counselling…………………

There has to be a guaranteed basic income for all people that would afford them a good standard of life. It is no good the wealthy churning out goods with few being able to afford to buy any of them.

The Future

The future could be an age of comfort and leisure where machines have taken over the drudgery and everybody has time and income to do what they want.

It could become an Orwellian future where the proles are kept in little boxes – surplus to requirements.

It could become a chaotic, violent period where anger mounts and the world’s poor wreck the machine and kill the wealthy elite who have caused their misery.

An age of plenty – An age of misery – An age of violent revolution and death.

We are at a crossroads.

What happens when the machines are intelligent enough, powerful enough and decide that we are all surplus to requirements?