The Robots Have Won. What Do We Do With the Humans?
No one expected the battle to be so brief.
True there were the occasional tinfoil hat wearers who kept banging the drum about things like “fourth industrial revolution”, technology-driven displacement, accelerating unemployment and the like. One even ran for President. But even those who believed the challenge of technology-driven unemployment was imminent didn’t expect the ferocity and speed of the attack. Most stunning was the fact that the barrage came from a source the nature of which is unclear and which seems to straddle the distinction between living and not. It’s the thing science fiction is made of. A virus.
Exactly how did this cause the robots to win?
50 years from now, historians will view 2020 as the beginning of a disruptive socio-economic transformation. Business and society will have reformatted itself after finding humans totally unreliable as a source of labour. We will have migrated much more rapidly to automation and technology than anyone predicted. The reason has become self-evident. Machines and software are not susceptible to disruption from viruses that affect humans. The extraordinary economic cost of trying to mitigate the economic effects of this pandemic will serve as an overwhelming incentive for businesses to rely less on fragile human resources and more on non-carbon based…