what will people be doing in a hundred years? in the 18 hundreds people started asking, with all this industrial revolution and uses of machinery what jobs are going to be left for people? people will just be sitting around. especially the labor force, the blue collar workers that make the whole thing work. they will all just be replaced by machines, like the cotton gin. now you may notice that there aren't too many horses on the road and there aren't too many horses out plowing fields. so, the industrial revolution has pretty much put the horse out of work. another exciting job that horses had was riding into battle. well nobody's going to be riding a horse into battle these days against drones and smart bombs sent from thousands of miles away. but somehow people are different. although you have to admit we certainly don't send as many people in the battle as we used to. I think we've lost somewhere around 8,000 people in the middle East in the last 25 years. at the end of world war II there were times they were losing 8000 people a day. somehow we always managed to keep people employed. they go to work somewhere and they keep the economy humming along. so the next threat to people's jobs was the digital information age. which also helped advance the robot age. now compared to movies, robots still look sort of simplistic and unimpressive but I think they put about 80% of the workforce out of work in the automotive industry. apparently those people are now on welfare or sitting at a desk job somewhere, or driving an Amazon delivery truck. so there are thousands and thousands of people driving trucks and cars these days. but wait, self-driving cars are going to put them all out of business. so maybe they'll all be sitting at desk somewhere constantly creating improvements to software to beef up the robots and all the stuff that's being done by automated machinery. and if that problem isn't big enough then we have artificial intelligence. I mean who needs humans, we can just artificially create intelligence. humans are messy and need health care. they're racist, they're sexist, they cheat steal and lie, and worst of all some of them are Republicans. but with artificial intelligence we just don't need people anymore. well let's see we have 8 billion of them.
somehow we keep overlooking that people do stuff by and large for other people. even when we were largely agricultural, people would trade and still used some sort of money. you can't trade money with animals just people. the whole thing feeds on itself. people are creating artificial intelligence basically for two reasons. to play games really smart and to sell people more stuff. if people start being out of work and not buying the stuff then they won't use that artificial intelligence anymore. oh we can use artificial intelligence to destroy other countries and take away their stuff. this works in the short run but if you're highly successful at it pretty soon there won't be anybody else to take over. I'm not sure where this is going at this point and that seems to be the problem we had with the whole subject of the advancement of technology and what it means to humans.
for now why don't we press on and see how it works out.
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