The other day during a discussion with my most learned friend, Deven Kalra
of Big 'G' Google, he told me the philosophy behind developing driverless car at
Google is, the man must do only those jobs where there is need to apply brain or
where it is imperative, rest all routine jobs must be handed over to
robots.
Hmmm... a great philosophy and logical too. Having come thus far and having
loads of information at hand, man's job should be to synthesis information and
work on technological solutions to take total control of our lives. Routine cut
copy paste jobs are waste of time and human resource when alternatives are
available.
Going back to history, man's obsession with tools has been integral to his
evolution. From hunting to going all the way spatial. Man has toyed with
machines. The basic instincts attached to this weird love are:
- Seeking comfort and ease of work
- Greed for more in the shortest possible time
- Identity crisis
Mechanization of human society has not been a smooth sailing. At various
levels it met with stiff resistance from the incumbent methods, practices, lobbies & religion. There was always a fear that the increasing use of machines would
render the human workforce unemployed. But on the contrary there were other
types of jobs created. And each time people embraced and settled to the
disruptive technology.
So far so good... But I have my own reservations now.
No doubt our hold on technology is stronger than ever before and it is
further growing manifolds at fast pace. But at the same time today the majority
of population is making living out of absolutely no skill petty cut&paste
data feeding jobs or simple machine operating and monitoring jobs. And that's a
great cause of concern. Technology in its stride is going to gobble up these
jobs someday very soon. That would leave a vast majority of this unskilled,
bum-ass (not used to mental or physical hardship) population
redundant.
Whenever I think of human society, I think of ants and bees and bacteria.
And that takes me into bit of biology. Some of the biological facts are:
- With in a generation, members of a species are born with various levels
of capabilities.
- Evolution of a species is direct function of the number of mutations and
population
Excessive consumption by the worker ants/bees will certainly change the ph
& temperature of the hive. The growing large population of bum-ass drones
will have to parish in order to preserve the resources, temperature and ph of
the hive. But these drones actually play a crucial role in evolution of the
hive. Thus any such eradication of the drones may hamper the evolution process
of human beings as whole.
Progression of human society has uncanny similarity to that of bacteria in
a culture. I guess, our growth is almost at the acme of the log phase now, which
would have to be followed by the stationary and death phases respectively.
...and that would leave the unmanned car without a passenger.
...and that would leave the unmanned car without a passenger.
