[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support

[Hari Sekhon]

Robert McKay wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 3:13 PM, t.clarke <tim at seacon.co.uk 
> <mailto:tim at seacon.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     One thing is for sure  - Robots in Nursing will never be able to
>     eat all those
>     boxes of chocolates given to them by grateful patients :-)
>
>
>     But seriously,  if all the 'non-skilled' and 'semi skilled' jobs
>     were to
>     disappear and be replaced by robots,  having the entire population
>     go to
>     University will solve nothing, since there simply would not be enough
>     'highly skilled' jobs to go around.
>
>
> The so called 'highly skilled' jobs are just as likely to be automated 
> away anyway. There's more motivation to automate them since the 
> margins are higher. People just aren't as useful/relevant as we have 
> been and we probably can't really justify our use of resources 
> anymore. This has bad implications for the economy and society in 
> general since it spells the end of any pretence of a meritocracy. 
> Ironically in the short term we may end up being more useful as robots 
> guided by augmented reality from a computer - at least until robotics 
> catches up a bit.

I love automation and do it for a living, but if the whole world were 
automated human populations would have to be drastically reduced. This 
would either be a utopia with space for fauna and flora (a huge 
ecological win if human populations are drastically reduced and the 
planet more sustainable in the long run) or more likely it would be a 
disaster as the world's (over)population implodes in a battle for 
resources/control as the majority would be out of 
work/money/food/whatever or the whole system would have to become 
totally socialist where those few top dogs are forced to give up enough 
of their wealth to effectively keep everyone employed and happy/busy 
enough not to revolt. Thankfully we're not there yet.

-h

-- 
Hari Sekhon
http://www.linkedin.com/in/harisekhon

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