Kevin Kelly of Wired contends that robots replacing workers isn’t something to be afraid of; in fact, it should be welcomed. Gary Marcus responds, quoting Kelly:
One possibility is that it won’t matter. Even if most of our jobs disappear and new ones can’t be found, productivity will grow; the overall pie will get bigger. Perhaps it won’t matter if some people, even a lot of people don’t have jobs. In Kelly’s optimistic vision,
Everyone has personal workbots…at their beck and call. Imagine you run a small organic farm. Your fleet of worker bots do all the weeding, pest control, and harvesting of produce, as directed by an overseer bot, embodied by a mesh of probes in the soil. One day your task might be to research which variety of heirloom tomato to plant; the next day it might be to update your custom labels. The bots perform everything else that can be measured.
But there is a darker possibility, too, which is that some people will own workbots before other people do, and that the people who lack workbots won’t be able to keep up with those to do. […]
While I generally share Marcus’ view, I want to throw something into the mix. The DIY community has been great at working on solutions that most people can work with — even if those solutions call for a little ingenuity and human labor. That’s been true of most things, from housewares, to automobiles, to software, to robotics and much more. Venues like Instructables are dedicated to the proliferation of democratic technology and home hacks. Before then, there were (still are) clubs and your grandparents cooking up the best alternatives to the better-branded, better-marketed new thing. Since we’re talking technology: think Linux, Arduino and civilization building.
If the next game changer are workbots and not everyone is able to afford a personal workbot, there will likely be someone who comes along and builds the great, useable, open-source version of one. I hope that doesn’t come off as advocating people make-with scraps, but rather presenting a possibility to challenge a (maybe) future where elites only own the robots and everyone else is left to toil. I hope it presents the possibility where communities and people can customize bots for their needs, rather than buying ready-made from Big Robotics, as it could be.
