THE ROBOTS COMETH

In a recent post, "It Should Be Interesting," we wrote:

Lowe's the big NYSE-traded Home Depot competitor in the do-it-yourself home fix-it business is set to introduce robotic shopping assistants next month in California, according to the Wall Street Journal

The first such robots in America, they bring to mind the old yin-yang principle in the increasing decline of employment importance of the human worker. Judge for yourself from the now nearly ubiquity of robot-guided menus one gets when calling companies these days.

The weekend edition of the Financial Times posted a piece by Robert Shrimsley, "The day will come when we create the machines that replace us," that's worth a look.

Quoting Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel, Player Piano,"The machines are what the white men were to the Indians." 

Vonnegut's novel is about a coming time when automation replaces all jobs except those at the lowest and the highest levels and people begin to realize that "machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply."

"Does this sound familiar? Shrimsley asks. " People have long accepted the human costs of technological advances in the name of progress.  Or perhaps it was because the victims were always someone else--factory workers or  peasant farmers. Now, suddenly, here are few professionals not looking at their Nespresso machines and wondering if its descendants will one day be doing their jobs."

Last month, Shrimsley continues, I attended a talk by one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence--a brilliant and decent man. but as the spoke it became clear that success means disproving any theory of human exceptionalism, showing us to be nothing more than learning machines awaiting obsolescence.

Of course, Technology creates as well as destroys jobs--but the speed and scale of the advance  suggests we  have made the classic error of being born in a period of upheaval. I blame the parents. they spawned a generation of Cherokee just as John Wayne was coming over the hill. Except that today's cavalry is a bunch of hoodied twentysomethings with an intellectual self-confidence to match the fervor of the early settlers and millionaire backers to boot.

This, as Shrimsley admits, might just be the hue and cry of a middle-age guy lamenting change that every new generation hears. But then again it just might be something else.

Maybe the in the end the climate change zealots will get their wish. The human population will dry up except for just enough to keep the robots coming.

Forget the Iceman and the Russians. The robots are coming.