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Bring On the Boring Robots
malachiorion writes: After a successful 6-month pilot, Savioke's 'butler bots' are heading to hotels around the country. These are not sexy, scary, or even technically impressive machines. But they were useful enough, over the course of their 2,000 or so deliveries, to warrant a redesign, and a larger deployment starting in April. Savioke's CEO had some interesting things to say about the pilot, including the fact that some 95 percent of guests gave the robot a 5-star review, and only the drunks seemed to take issue with it. Plus, as you might expect, everyone seemed to want to take a damn selfie with it. But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines.
We are gradually moving towards a future where we don't ever directly interact with other humans. All of our "interpersonal" relationships will be handled through technology proxies, and robots will take care of all our lonely needs.
Me, I'd rather be a Spacer - not part of this generation.
#DeleteChrome
For me the problem isn't so much the machines, it is that we still have a political/economic system based on the idea that everybody needs to work to survive, yet we are quickly creating a society where only the smartest are able to do that.
In Finland you seem to have a much better appreciation of this and invest into things like education so that people can work in these new jobs in addition to having a more redistributive income tax system. However this is not common throughout the western world, and indeed in countries like the UK the quality and value of the education system has been eroded (thanks to the for-profit focus) over the last decade to the point where many graduates leave with little more than debt. In addition the de-facto tax system here is heavily skewed in favour of the wealthy (if you own capital it is easy to evade tax).
This dysfunction is what automation threatens to expose, and I think this is more what the original poster is lamenting when s/he talks about the problems with these machines.
Having been to Helsinki many years ago, you have a very unique culture and socio-political system. I hope you can serve as an example for others as to how this sort of automation tech can improve life for everybody rather than destroy the middle class.