Comic Strips

Or, you know, we could use robots to slowly transform our society into a robotic utopia, where people get universal basic income and can do what the fuck they want, because robots do most of the work to keep our lives running.

But yeah, currently they are only attractive because they save costs. And that is attractive because we live in a capitalistic, profit driven society and not one where the well being of everyone is prioritized. (Although they can also help out in areas where human workforce is not available anyway, e.g., elderly care in several countires. Then again there are insufficient financial incentives to work in that area.) That's why it's highly probable that they will – for a long time – continue to be tools which will ease lower level work, so that humans can focus on higher level tasks. However, this level of capability is increasing over time, requiring even higher qualified humans to do very high level tasks until even those are replaced by thinking machines.

We currently have a pyramid of work. Most jobs require low to mid level education or qualification. The higher the qualification level is, the less jobs are available (but usually very well paid though). What we are going to see is that robots wil replace one by one the lower level parts of this pyramid. And that's bad, because unemployment rates will increase, because of that. A lot of people don't want to or can't improve on their education / qualification. And even if they would, I doubt that there will be a sufficient amount of jobs available. (That would be a good question for a research project though, since I don't really know how many new jobs could be created by requiring less lower level work. I am just pessimistic right now.) ChatGPT caused a lot of concerns in text writing industries. Image generating AIs caused similar distress in the creative industry. Developments like this will continue at a high speed. At some point machines will be able to improve machines completely on themselves. Then we will have an explosion of machine intelligence.

Society is not prepared for this.

That's why I am advocating that politics have to speed up creating laws and rule frameworks in which robots are allowed to be developed and operated and which also take care of those who are in danger of unemployment and financial starvation.