Does Anyone Else Believe That the Robots Will Never Fully Take Over?
Yes, there will be automation, but there will always be humans behind the kiosk.
Every day I go out walking. While I’m walking, I see the houses, the construction zones, and all the stuff piled up in half-open garages. I know that they have the same stuff that I have, lawnmowers, leafblowers, tools, shelving, organizers, camping gear, and anything else not deemed worthy of space in the house with the humans. All of it was made with some form of automation.
That’s how we scale.
But everything breaks at scale. Every form of automation that we have ever produced requires some human intervention. If God did one thing perfectly, he made sure that whatever is composed will decompose, especially if humans composed it.
I’ve seen enough scary stories about robots and how they’re coming for our jobs. But I’ve also noticed something else. Nothing we do, nothing we could ever want to have done, is ever completely automated.
That’s what I see when I think about robots and humanity. Yes, we’ll have some robots. They’ll do some of the work. Maybe even a lot of the work, don’t know for sure. But robots are not alive. They don’t have the same drive for survival that humans do. They can’t even match the intelligence of a house fly, at least, not yet.
The definition of life is that it responds to stimulation, reproduces, metabolizes, and it has a sense of self-preservation. A fly can take care of itself as long as my wife is not around. A fly knows how to find food, safety, and a mate. I have yet to see a robot that can match wits with a housefly. I’m not sure that I ever will.
When robots take our jobs, they will be bumping up against all of that in us. We’re fine with robots on the assembly line. They’re great at injection molding, welding, gluing, painting, and picking recyclable items from a stream of trash.
But they’re not good at customer service. They can’t sense the urgency we experience in our lives when something is broken and our boss or our wife wants it fixed. They don’t know what it really means to stop.
