Industrial Robot
Slowly, but surely, robots (and virtual ’bots that exist only as software) are taking over our jobs; according to one back-of-the-envelope projection, in ninety years “70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.” Should we be worried? Kevin Kelly, “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, and source for the above guestimate, says we shouldn’t. Instead, argues Kelly, in a Utopian piece titled “Better than Human,” we should welcome our new robot overlords. “They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. [But] they will [also] help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are.” People have lost their jobs before, and everything turned out fine.
