[ExI] robotic lunch counters

[spike]

>… On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2014 2:57 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] robotic lunch counters

 

>…Spike, if you haven't already, google "Momentum Machines".  They are but one of the companies trying to implement this sort of thing.  If you can introduce them to funding or other resources, so much the better…

Ja thanks, I know of them.  My notion is to combine the 50s lunch counter notion with robo-waiters, together with Momentum’s food prep-bot.  From a marketing standpoint, it makes a cool fun mixed-metaphor eating establishment, which I hope causes patrons to think hard as they munch their burgers: what happens when all service-level jobs are done by robots?  Don’t brush aside the question or spew the usual talking points, think my extropian future-minded friends.  Gaze into the near-term future.

You guys know me by now: I am the local hard-core capitalist cheerleader.  I can see that there is good justification for taking starvation off the table as a consequence of being unable to find employment.  Plenty of us here can see that.  How?  

Perhaps the patrons of robo-café will realize where we are in history: feedback and control theory is getting sophisticated enough to obviate plenty of humans in plenty of jobs.  If human employees are no longer needed, they don’t just go away.  There is no away.  Here is away.  We, as a society, as communists, socialists, democrats, republicans, libertarians, tea party, liberal, conservative hard core minarcho-capitalists, engineering geeks, artists and anyone else I missed, need to collectively recognize where we are, and stop fooling ourselves.  The future doesn’t need everyone here, and the future’s need for some of us is only declining, with no end in sight.  Eschewing robo-cafés will not make the problem go away; embracing them will not make it go away either.

What do we do now?

spike

 

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