I often find myself around conversations about robots and how people are losing jobs to machines, and how awful it is that cashiers can be replaced with self check outs. It’s unsettling to me listening to these conversations because all I can think of is just how wonderful it would be and how much of humanity would be able to just open up if we could replace fast food work and cashier work and laborer work with machines if - now this if is important - if we could get away from the capitalist structure society lives within. I can picture so clearly a world where ‘day jobs’ are taken care of by machines and everywhere has a Universal Basic Income so no one goes hungry or is without a place to live. A world where the people who would otherwise be forced to do these physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding jobs are free to follow their passions and put their brilliant minds to use because they wouldn’t be slaving away in a job that wrecks them. Imagine the art people would create; the music, the fiction, imagine the discoveries people would make, how rapidly science and technology would advance if there were more people who could dedicate themselves to their interests and passions. God the advancement of technology has so much potential to completely change the way people live all across the world if only humanity as a whole could change the way we view and value human life and productivity. Sometimes I hear people talking about the advancement of technology and robotics and such in a way that just astounds me. Because they’re all for it! Curious and excited and full of wonder at what can be done, what might be able to be done in the next year or five. But only up to a point. Only up to the point where it doesn’t encroach on jobs. Only up to a point where the people who aren’t making a living wage because of capitalism anyway aren’t going to be out of work. Because they need to be at work and slaving away so that they have somewhere to live and something to eat, and electricity to see by so that they can fall asleep exhausted and get up the next morning to do the same thing until their weekend when they’re so worn down they’ll sit in front of the tv all day anyway. And these people who think this. Who limit their interest in and support of advancing technology are entirely missing the point. They’re missing all of the ways people who individually and as a whole could benefit from more personal freedom in our lives thanks to technology. And I just don’t understand how they can miss it. How can capitalism run so deeply in their veins that people who are otherwise so loving and humanitarian not see the horror it causes across the entire planet and not see the possibilities and benefits that exist if it changes.
