An empty mind is a devil’s workshop. Please remember this saying while reading through rest of this article. Human race has achieved some remarkable feats in the last 300 years or so. We now live longer and healthier.
Poverty is on the decline globally and for the first time in human history, we are at least hopeful that we can provide basic amenities of life to every human on the planet in the near future. Constant Innovation has improved our lives but it seems fate always smiles back at us with a sense of irony.
With every new invention and more automation in every sphere of our lives, the amount of daily work that we do is declining rapidly. Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. So here are few examples from our future.
- Driverless cars controlled by smart algorithms drive us through our cities.
- 6 percent of retail sales are done on the web these days, but that number will spike to 20 percent in the next decade. It will be 50 percent in two decades which will result in elimination of at least 40 Million jobs in US alone. Imagine a retail world, where you order stuff online and it is delivered to your home by drones.
- Robots managing our manufacturing assembly lines for us.
- Specialized drones and robots planting seeds and harvesting crops for us
- Doctors and surgeons being replaced by big data patient diagnostics and high precision robots for surgery. Today a computer can map diseases with its symptoms more accurately and quickly than an average physician.
- War will be fully automated as well as the number of drones for war and human surveillance continues to rise dramatically. For example, US can now kill without worrying about body bags of their own soldiers. Technology has also made war easier and politically manageable. Soon China and other countries will also have their own kill lists.
- Algorithms are also replacing financial managers and lawyers with technologies such as High Frequency trading and contextual search
The list goes on and on. I can probably tell you many more spheres of life where technology will outsmart humans. Any human who is smarter than an average machine will be probably be busy in designing, programming and owning machines but there are very few humans who have IQs of over 160. Programming computers will be the next big skill in next 10 years or so for smart men. Rest of us will not work because we would have no reason, motivation or desire to work. Probably smart governments will deliver our basic needs to our homes through their massively automated systems. I think we can all agree that majority of humans will have less and less work in coming years as we continue to progress and automate systems around us.
But what do humans do when we have no work? In offices, most people go through silly websites or watch porn when there is not much work lying around. Why do crime numbers rise whenever there is massive unemployment in any part of the world? In my opinion, People need to be busy for at least six hours a day to be kept at their best behavior. The data that I have collected so far tells me that only 2.5% humans do something good such as creating art or building new stuff when they have free time. Sports and gaming also keep our minds busy but they are not a necessity and these activities are a matter of personal choice. If you closely observe the life patterns of people (such as actors, musicians, lottery winners) who get rich quickly and instantaneously without hard work, you will find that they end up doing terrible things to themselves (drugs, suicides, highly unstable human relationships).
The question remains that when most of us will have no work, will we try to destroy each other or do something noble? May be governments will plug our minds into virtual reality gaming worlds like matrix to keep away from cutting each other throats. Whatever the case may be, constant idleness will change our behaviors in the decades to come. It is a disturbing truth that we need work in our lives to keep us sane. Perhaps that’s why God created work and these little difficulties in our lives to keep us busy.Because work not only keeps us busy but also teaches us to compromise and negotiate. Without work, most humans have the tendency to become uncompromising aspiring emperors.
We humans might be very smart but are not very wise in the long run. I have heard and seen so many scientists claim that internal combustion engine was our greatest general purpose invention which resulted in much economic growth but the truth is that it also destroyed our environment and ecosystems resulting in climate changes. Now we can see all around the globe that carbon based fossil fuels are killing our environment. Our greatest invention can cause our own extermination.
Thesedays computers and Machine Learning are hyped to be the next big thing and the future driver of economic growth.Oscar Wilde was a smart man. He once said that in human lifethere are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. In my humble opinion, Man is the pinnacle of the Creation not because of his head but because of his heart. So beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
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