The Dark Side of Autonomous Tech Nobody Wants to Talk About
Autonomous trucks have helped spur an emerging conversation on just how far robots can go in taking human jobs and the consequences those lost jobs means for society as a whole. Photo credit: Otto
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Autonomous trucks have helped spur an emerging conversation on just how far robots can go in taking human jobs and the consequences those lost jobs means for society as a whole. Photo credit: Otto
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A couple of hundred years ago, things moved a lot slower, but society was actually undergoing a radical and sweeping transformation. The steam engine had kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Factories were springing up. New-fangled ideas such as wage-laborers and a 12-hour working day were starting to take shape. At the same time, great thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx were hammering out the basic concepts of the modern economic systems that shape our world today: Capitalism on one end of the spectrum, Communism on the other.
I was reminded of this today by news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is under fire for suggesting that companies that displace human workers with robots should pay special taxes for doing so.
Gates’ comments were not well received by a number of business and government leaders. But he’s one of the leading thinkers of our time, so when he speaks on a topic, I’m inclined to hear what he has to say. While his may not be a popular view, given all the talk about autonomous trucks at the moment – and the corresponding angst that talk has created – I do think it’s worth thinking about.
Lessons From History
Back to some history for a moment: Once the ideas of Capitalism, industrialism and labor had all joined forces, factory and business owners started looking for ways to cut or control costs. After all, the whole point of Capitalism is to make money. And, so the theory goes, you have to have help from other people if you want to make a huge pile of money. And you have to make doing …Read the rest of this story
