I heard a presentation yesterday by one of my favorite economists, Prof. Larry Weiser. He spoke about the conditions of American manufacturing.
We heard that the share of the American gross domestic product (GDP), the value of all goods and services made in the US, that comes from manufacturing has remained basically constant for decades. However, the number of Americans working in manufacturing has taken a big tumble, mostly because of automation and robots. We learned that American workers are roughly 6 times as productive as Chinese workers, again because of the methods, automation, computerization and robots.
I asked if we could get robots that can run our government. The others present hooted and made remarks about the idea.
Maybe you know that some thinkers worry about the advances in robotics that seem to imply that most, if not all, jobs, will be done better by robots in the future.
The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez is a story about a futuristic society that has some of its criminal detection needs performed by robots.
Isaac Asimov's book I, Robot, begins with the story of a robot who cares for a small child and clearly does a better job than the child's actual mother.
You may know that Stephen Hawking, one of the world's leading astronomers, recently stated that he was worried about the future of humankind with artificial intelligence developing greater and greater abilities. Many thinkers, novelists and writers have pictured a crisis where robots war against humans but it seems to me that humans may find that they benefit more from robots than are harmed by them.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
