In an ideal world, relieving us of the menial tasks will free us to spend our time concentrating on higher pursuits. If I don’t have to mow the lawn, I can paint, or invent things, or write.
Star Trek always had the idea that the future would see technologies that would eliminate the need to do mundane things, including earning a living at some menial job, and so people would achieve their best potential naturally without silly barriers like having to spend 25% of our lives producing for someone else, and another 25% doing rote chores like mowing and laundry (with a further 25% dedicated to sleeping).
Where Star Trek got it wrong is that it assumed that humans were capable of evolving beyond the need to assign transactional value to everything - I’m not convinced that’s the case. And so all these inventions that make life easier just free up time to be spent doing other crap we don’t want to do because we have to.
A good example is the smart phone. Great idea. Really cool that I have the internet in my pocket and can look up anything, any time, anywhere. Unfortunately, my office figured that out and now I’m expected to be available almost 24/7 to respond to emails, log in to my work computer and do things, etc. They even want me to remain plugged in while on vacation, and they’re not unusual for American workplaces. One of the reasons I like cruise vacations so much is that I can tell them my phone doesn’t work on the ship and so I can’t do any work at all.
So this device that should be making our lives much better has instead been twisted to chain us ever more tightly to producing work for other people at the expense of producing work for ourselves. The same thing’s gonna happen with self driving cars. If I don’t have to sit in traffic paying attention to driving for 2 hours a day, I can work while the car drives for me. In a just system this would mean I could leave work after 6 hours instead of 8 because I am doing 2 hours worth of work on the way in. But in reality it’ll mean I work 10 hours a day, because that’s how America does things, to its detriment.
What will I do with my time when I don’t have to go down to the river to beat my cloths on a rock to get them clean?
What will I do with my time when I don’t have to go get a block of ice every day for my Ice Box?
What will I do with my time when I can drive to the store in 10 minutes instead of taking the Horse and buggy that takes almost an hour?
Similarly,…What will I do with my time when I can type, edit, and print multiple copies of a document in just a few minutes, rather than assembling multiple layers of carbon paper and bond paper into my typewriter, using correction fluid on all of those copies when I make an inevitable mistake, and still wind-up with copies that don’t look particularly good?
Yeah I remember multiple colors of correction fluid to match the various colors of copies. You guys made me think back to George McGovern though. I liked George but he went down in flames I think with the worst performance in history. Later in life when he actually operated a business he claimed some of his ideas were really wrong. So nothing new. History repeats itself. Just like wars, every generation seems to have to resolve it. Oh yeah one of his ideas was the negative income tax that turned into the current low income credit. Hows that working out? Nothing is free. To give to one person requires taking it from someone else. If you win a free tune up, some poor guy has to do the work for nothing. Yes?
My first presidential election! I voted for Nixon. When I got in the voting booth, I asked myself if I wanted to vote for a crook or an idiot. I voted for the crook.
He was also a neighbor! Not real close, though. He lived next door to a high school friend, though. His son was in my senior year English class. Well, he was for a day or two, then skipped the rest of them. His daughter is two years younger. This would have been when he was a Senator.
I also knew one of the men that broke into the DNC offices. His son is my age, and we were in the same Sunday school class. Really nice family. I felt sorry for them, given the break-in, but the guy did have to pay the price for his actions.
I think all this efficiency… or the dream of more time and no menial tasks etc… surely has the potential to get really really sideways.
Who knows what myriad interpersonal skills we develop or life lessons we learn whilst doing “menial labor” or tasks no one says they want to perform… All sorts of personality skills are developed within that realm, like it or not.
Having to deal with distasteful people, things, tasks all while not flying off the handle and being a psychopath to your fellow man… there are lessons in there, surely.
If we eliminate the stressful or distasteful, unpleasant… imagine what would occur should one of those happen to crop up in life and terrorize the new modern “Snowflake People” of the future. Ones with Nuclear capabilities…and firearms…etc
I’m not afraid of automation. People like to work and be productive. It’s just part of our being. Take away menial tasks, and the time will be spent on other productive tasks. People aren’t meant to sit on the couch flipping through their phones. I think back a generation ago when electricity was brought to farms. Running water, cow milkers, and then tractors made them more productive. They still work hard with all the computers and automation, just on different tasks. We still have pilots in planes too regardless of how automated they are. I sat next to a pilot coming back from someplace and when we landed I said who landed the plane, the pilot or the computer? He said both. Tools. They are all just tools that we use. Hopefully NASCAR will never just run driverless cars around the track to see which programmer did better.
I would add to this, autonomous vehicles can never truly be totally safe until someone invents a computer that cannot be hacked. There was a news item about white hat hackers that hacked a vehicle, which the hacker could start, stop, turn, adjust the HIVAC and radio, but completely exclude the ability of the driver to intervene. This was done through the entertainment system (it was a Jeep Cherokee, access was through FCA’s UConnect system). With more and more cars having WiFi capabilities this could become more and more of a problem.
You could have ended it there. They’ll never be 100% safe, and we have to stop acting as though they should be before we adopt them.
As long as they’re safER than human drivers, they’re a good thing. 40,000 people died in car crashes last year in this country alone. Even if AI cars got in enough wrecks to kill 35,000 people, that’s a significant improvement over the status quo.
My company designs and builds systems for the Telecom industry. Our systems use 256 bit encryption. Some of our systems have been installed in the Middle-East and South America. We’ve had systems there running for several years and with well over 1 million attacks a month - they’ve never been hacked. 99.999% of systems you hear about that have been hacked - it’s one of two things.
. Little or no security in place. Example of that is the Target data breach a few years back. Their security was almost non-existent.
. Inside job.
We don’t fly the plane, we don’t drive the bus, we don’t operate the train. We’re just passengers. Eventually, cars will be the same. We will call for a car and one will come to take us where we want to go. Imagine what you could do with all that money and time you’ve spent on cars in your lifetime
Daddy, did they have garages when you were little?
Well, maybe three: the innocent insiders that are duped by crooks to let them into the network through criminal email hacking, or other ruses to get inside. We have extensive training every year to slow this down.
I was in charge among other things computer security. I remember a story, I forget the company, but it was a big one. Some guys in microsoft shirts said we are here to service your computers. It was lunch hour, nobody was in so a person let them in the computer room. They put a server on a cart, said we have to take this in for service and wheeled it out the front door. There are so many avenues of attack.
Heh heh. Yeah the server rooms were on key card access with very very limited access so the top tier could not even get in. Of course the $10 an hour janitor could. Floors gotta be mopped and computer folks make too much money for that.
