Whether it's Will Smith saving humanity from the robots, the heart breaking Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man or the insatiably cute WALL-E, while undoubtedly entertaining, these films bring with them an eerie sense of foreboding and forces us to consider what future we are heading towards.
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Perhaps it is only because I seem to be self-service deficient. Everytime I attempt to swipe my items across the red line of the grocery store scanning machine, the impersonal voice of - I can only imagine to be ‘Siri’s’ sister, lets call her ‘Siro’ for stories sake - chimes out at me, ‘please place item in the bagging area.’ But Siro I have placed the item in the bagging area, it’s just a card and is virtually weightless.
I stand and wait while ‘assistance is required’.
To me this is a great inconvenience and is only one example of robots taking charge of menial societal functions.
Gone are the days when an attendant came to fill up your car at the petrol station, chatting to you about the news of the day, checking your tyres and essential car fluids - perhaps car maintenance has gone downhill as a result also. GPS operated tractors, that can sew a field with little human interaction. And let's not forget the entire virtual world. In fact, we can now perform our unavoidable tasks without dealing with another human being at all. Ah, the antisocial generation.
The average retirement age was 70 and at the end of last year and there were 750,000 unemployed people in Australia, and about one million under-employed; it seems as though employment is decreasing as the economy is booming.
So why robots?
These machines are designed to make our lives easier, yes, but how long for? When we develop these all seeing all doing robots, what does that leave for the rest of us to do?
To make sense of this, we need to understand the race to replace humans with machines.
Designed in the hope to make our lives easier, yet inevitably will they make it even harder to acquire employment? Perhaps thrusting us into a one per cent generation, to leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
If you think about your current employment is there an eventual chance that an intelligent ‘bot’ can replace you? Not even my career is safe, with computer generated systems that produce articles using JAVA scripted formulas. The robots are taking over!
Maybe jobs growth will catch up with capital expenditure, or perhaps we will spend more time and money being educated to keep up with these machines, but it's hard to imagine the definition of full employment getting back to what it was before the rise of the machines.
