

Robots: Why We need them - bd284163

Ever since I can remember I have been attending school, being taught what to know, learning. Middle school, high school, college, for the first 22 years of my life I have done nothing but learn, this process is so ingrained in my mind that now, a college graduate, finding a full-time job and entering “the real world” almost seems foreign to me. And yes, I have worked before, summer jobs were a must so I could have that extra cash in my pocket. I feel like this is what the average American, average human goes through in there lifetime, 22 years of learning followed by another 40+ in the work force. But why? Why must I work for 40+ years, the statistics say that my major, business, tops out at around $65,000 a year, if I'm lucky. My question again is Why? How does the average human stand this? 40+ years of work, of indentured servitude. There is no way that God intended humans to live like this, and even if you don't believe in God, there is no way humans want to do this. Do we? Do we want to wake up every day for the next 40+ years at 7:00am, shower, eat breakfast, go to work for 8+ hours, come home, feed ourselves, kiss our significant other goodnight and then do it all over again in the morning? For 40+ years! I would say from what I have heard from other, middle-class, upper-middle class, working humans, that no, no one wants to do this. So then why do we follow the social norm, what would happen if everyone said, “Fuck it.” Fuck work I want to experience life, the world. I want to share the rest of my life with someone, my family, and do whatever I want to do. Fuck Corporate America. But wouldn't the world fall apart, the economy would crash, we would become a third world country if everyone did this, Right? Some may say, but how can I afford that, I don't have the time or the money, this is a radical, horrific idea. And this is why we need robots!<p>This is the setup. One day computer chips become fast enough and memory becomes cheap enough that building a robot, like in I, Robot is possible. Some company IBM, Microsoft, Google creates these robots and sells them to the general public. Hypothetically, these robots are very expensive, lets say they cost $100,000 dollars. Maybe they will be mass produced and only cost $50,000 or $10,000. the price does not matter because every adult would buy one. It would be like a second mortgage. You spend the money and then pay it off over a period of time, lets say 30 years. But, that robot is yours, it can go to work for you and you get its pay. Its a robot it doesn't need money. And further more, it doesn't need to eat, sleep, or shit. In fact it can work 24/7, 52 weeks a year at YOUR job. If you/your robot is making $15 dollars an hour, it would roughly make 8760 hours x $15 =  $131,400 pre-tax. And that is the low end. Once again hypothetically, lets say that the average American still goes to school and learns and is somehow able to pass on their knowledge to their robot. This is not as far fetched as it may seem. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft great, has already mapped the human brain, in its entirety. If there was someway to pass this knowledge on to a robot, either through electrodes attached to your brain, or maybe it has to be programmed like a computer, then a robot would know as much as its owner did/does. Who knows how this would be accomplished or if it even can be, I am not that smart, however, I know someone in the world is. This robot would be as smart or dumb as its human counterpart. It could easily fulfill the job task of the human, as we, humans, sit back and actually enjoy life, as I believe we were meant to.<p>Now once again, many people are probably thinking this is crazy, impossible, stupid. Utopias always fail just look at human history. I am not talking about a Utopia, there will always be problems in the world. Psychopaths, who murder, steal, and otherwise fuck life up for the average human. And I am not saying that every job should be run by a robot. Obviously, we still need elected officials and other jobs. Teachers would still teacher (I find that most teachers teach because they enjoy kids, however, they do not enjoy staying up to 12am on a school night grading papers, can anyone say robot) and  some jobs would still require a human presence. But, that could be a second job, because you have a robot doing another job for you. Twice the income!! Think about all the industrial, agricultural, etc jobs that robots would be perfect at. If we had robots right now in this hypothetical situation, we probably would not have had the financial crisis. A wife and husband walk into a bank and ask for a loan so that they can purchase a house. The robot does its job, applies a known formula and says, “Hell fucking no you can't afford a $300,00 dollar mortgage. No greed, no sympathy, just honest truth.<p>I do not see a situation in which this would be bad. The other argument I see is what if something like I, Robot, or terminator actually happened and robots turn on humans. I personally do not think A.I(artificial intelligence) is possible. Robots can not feel, they cannot think independently, there is no reason for them to. They just need to be smart enough to do there given job, mostly of which is physical labor or something of which an algorithm can be applied to. Robots will always be inorganic there is no way for them to feel pain, how could there be? We should not fear this and if we did, an EMP or something could be implanted in each and every robot. There is no reason for them to be connected to the internet or intranet, they just need to known what there human counterpart knows.<p>Once again I do not think this will solve the worlds problems, but I am interested in hearing what others think about this. I would say I will never see anything like this in my lifetime. I am already preparing for my life of indentured servitude to corporate American. I just do not understand how we, as humans, have come to except this fate!!
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Clotho
I think what you've done by adding slaves to the mix is reduce the value of
human labor relative to other assets, making the holders of resources like
land, water, oil, etc stronger.

For instance you still need food and how much food can be grown is limited by
the land it can be grown on. However if you want to get a job picking oranges
you can now only earn what it would cost to operate a robot to do the same
task. So your income drops and farmer is more powerful.

Consider that in the US it was not the norm for women to work outside the home
until the '80's and the wealth of families has not increased as a result of
most households now having two working adults. As a matter of fact it's gone
down.

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div
That, and no employer will ever pay a wage to a robot. He'll just replace his
employees with robots he buys himself. Even at 100k as the OP posited, a
typical robot will have paid for itself in 2-3 years. Anything after that is
pure profit.

The whole concept of sending a robot to your job and getting it's wage is
delusional.

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Clotho
The trick of course would be to have a roving robot army that pillaged like
Attila.

