Fear of Automation and job anxiety
These days often the hype we read is regarding automation and robotics,how coupled with artificial intelligence this new age technology would decimate jobs in almost all industries and how the richer would be armed with more cash at expense of working class or even white collared ones
Though often is the case,exaggerations are often used to predict a doomsday scenario of future,but let us ask is this technology really going to change the world for better by proclaiming productive gains ,ensuring humans have a far "better quality " of life?
In my opinion,nothing of that sort would happen, the quality of life isnt equivalent to vast troves of cash or income,but its directly proportional to your own worth or identity you place in this world,Humans use craft and work for income as well as that self assurance of productivity and worth which somehow become interwoven
Beyond a certain threshold of gains in income and quality of life,humans become detached to what one say is natural process of life ,and I would argue a certain alienation builts in , a life where technology would even do all the aspects of thinking, analytics and what not,,rendering Humans as useless one day, since as AI becomes powerful everyday by machine learning it would get better and better at everything meaning humans just cant compete with it in future
So we are cross-roads now,one should ask our place in human society, is that what the role of humans would be reduced to? merely,being a techno-slave,where eventually pressure to compete with such cognitive machines would be so high that societies would risk being having a melt down
The old structure of society as we had known ,where people would actually be interacting,talking, say someone flipping burgers wouldnt be thinking how he has to compete with a robotic automation ,in effect,this whole process is trying one to make uni-dimensional, where one has to agree with sets of conventions of a futuristic technology else risk being a pariah or outcaste
Comparions are made how technological advances in past have contributed to immense productivity and income gains, I would agree yes it did help people in past to move from certain back breaking jobs to one where they can actually enjoy leisure of life
But eventually,this whole exercise is a vicious circle, for contentment is a hard thing to define, a person would always be dissatisfied, and Buddha used Dukkha meaning,all experiences in life get negated and one remains discontent ,since no experience is eternal and permanent,so at most all Utopian dreams do end in dystopian world, a world of individuation, remote existence ,a loneliness life,and Robotic would ensure human interact less and less and probably one day they might even fall in love with Robots itself
This is the danger of dystopian society, life does become meaningless and nonsensical, people would then have an existential crisis and I proprose, the future wouldnt be so joyful as it is made out to be, with advent of technology controlling all aspects of our life, we would end up as nihilistic drones
And,finally, to be human means to err, so a Human would commit errors, and thats the beauty of being conscious, to learn from errors and not to crave for some perfection,but robotics are going to be less error prone and would become perfect in everything they do,Humans by definiton cant, and this would breed a new world of despondency and gloom to those who cant be highly intelligent
But we do have a solution, one can opt to quit from this mindless race of exponential automation growth, which is drummed up as some great Human productivity,except for developing nations I will propose most humans in developed nations already have achieved the minimum standard for quality life
What is at stake here is a life devoid of work,some jobs may never get replaced, a job isnt about money but a socially fulfilling experience of some worth and purpose in life, and if robotics are going to take away even most lower end jobs,I doubt most can be happy doing nothing but watching |TV,lazing around and just reading
A society is made of consumers, so there might be still some industries in future where humans constitute majority of workers, and if such robotics and automation has to be controlled, most humans can support industry where most workers are humans and not some machines
At best,our productivity would be stalled,but then finally we humans would be in control of our destiny and our making,rather than resign ourselves to control of some automation or robotics,where even ordinary human error would be construed as imperfection and that I think will make Robotics our GOD,since there would come a time when everything AI deduces would be considered best of choices,a best of probability,best of odds,and yet that AI world is about statistical probability where a black swan event does happen ,so I hope humans would understand that ,else if all processes,thinking, inferences and deductions are left for AI, we would live in a world,where one black swan event if and when it occurs will destroy everything we worked for,and imagine if that happens and humans in future are reduced to a life dependent on AI, that would mean humanity might have a uphill task and might never control back their destiny.
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