Robots are bullshit because of Moravec’s Paradox and Polanyi’s Paradox.
My original speculation on work and wages - Future speculation on wages
Wages are going to go up. Blue collar gets rich, white collar gets poor.
Opinion: Robots are a political fiction for Westerners in the same way the Soviet Scientific Superman or the Aryan Superman were for those societies. Our culture has been dominated by the political orientation and beliefs of the middle class who mostly perform abstract work with their brains. This causes strange biases to exist.
It is a little known fact to most of the middle class in our society that there has been almost no serious progress in robotics for decades. Rodney Brooks - the creator of most consumer robot designs has said the same thing on his blog because he knows the limitations. What is really possible is separate from the fiction the median person believes about robotics. I’ve watched countless youtube channels and television specials about robots - and all of it is total bullshit - usually conflating computational power with a market possibility and assuming a take off event is imminent. This has been assumed for literally more than half a century. The difference between a Boston Dynamics robot and the ones invented in the '50s is not big. It is not happening because there are fundamental scientific obstacles that are not understood. Several centuries ago the French had streets of artisans attempting to put together automata - ingenious designs. It came to nothing obviously - and Silicon Valley is in a similar position today. Even its information processing improvements amount to human intelligence harvesting projects that are not fundamental information science breakthroughs to say nothing of their failure in robotics. You’ll never see it explained that way in a news headline because journalists and politicians have bought into a mass illusion. Looking carefully at the success stories like Kiva you notice the same pattern over and over - they are always augmenting human labour instead of replacing it. You should then want to ask if this is so why are we constantly assailed with news of its replacement.
Seen in this way, UBI and basic income are projects blue collar workers ought to reject because they will represent a fiscal transfer going exclusively from their class to another class.
There is a popular saying that it is impossible for a man to understand something that does not benefit him. In the industrial revolution part of what caused rapid change was that a lot of people became unemployed. Now that we are in an age where this happens to a different group of people it is being suggested to us that this time it should be different. That should be thought long and hard about!
