Rise of the machines - Demise of Humans

• My local library is introducing a pilot scheme to allow people access out of hours with a card & Pin Number. Who needs librarians who actually know something about books?

• Most supermarkets now have self check outs. Cashiers are a dying breed & queues for them are longer.

• Most airlines do online check in & boarding pass issuing.

• Train tickets are issued online or by machines at stations. Finding someone to ask if you are unsure what to do is almost impossible.

• Trains are being totally disrupted because of the dispute over removing guards and allowing drivers to press a button to close doors. This raises an issue of safety which I'm not competent to comment on.

• Cars & goodness knows what else are assembled by robots. Will there be any factory workers in the future?

• We are all used to filling our own cars with petrol.

• We rarely go into banks, we get money from a hole in the wall, pay bills & check statements on line. The friendly bank manager who knows us is a dinosaur - consigned to history.

• Telephone systems are automated. Gone are the Operators other than those in the dire call centres based all over the world.

• Email hasn't quite taken over from post completely, but for how long? No one writes letters anymore.

• We are remarkably close to computer diagnosis of illness. That may be a good thing given the difficulty in recruiting & retaining enough GP's.

• Farming is becoming ever more mechanised. The debate about foreign pickers may well be very short lived if harvesting can be done by machine.

• There is even a robot you can have sex with now if you are unable to make a conventional relationship, which for a variety of reasons seems to be on the increase!

 

 All good ideas - Or are they? Working out the impact on jobs & therefore people, isn't rocket science. This is only the beginning. We may well be more efficient. We probably are saving time. The commercial benefits in increased profits are obvious. The technology genie is out of the bottle & our capability grows exponentially.

But what about people? What will they do? How will they earn money & occupy their time? 

We really should be thinking about consequences.