There are, of course, Jewish robots, and they drink wine on Seder.
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Robots
Okay, it wouldn’t be so bad if Rodney Copperbottom was your bartender. You know him, right, the genius robot inventor of Robots?
He’s a great guy. Kindhearted, smart, well-intentioned, a true friend. You could trust him with your deepest secrets, and if you were feeling down, he would listen to your story, give you a ride home if you needed one, and certainly repair all your broken parts.
But as you may or may not know by now, robots are probably going to steal all our jobs someday and then put us out to pasture, maybe in not such a nice way. It’s already started, and they’re not just taking all the dirty jobs. They’re already pouring drinks. Yep, robot bartenders.
Maybe not perfectly yet. The guy at Wired had this to say.
As for the drinks themselves, having sampled drinks from almost all the robots, my verdict is that the robots still have a long way to go. The cocktails taste just a little too clinical. There’s a missing ingredient in there. Could that be the human touch?
Oh yeah, a little too clinical, but how long before the robots make a few fine adjustments and start pouring drinks that aren’t a little too clinical for a drink expert at Wired too detect and soon start making drinks better than the neighborhood bartender?
It would be okay if your neighborhood bartending robot was Rodney Copperbottom, but what if he was secretly one of the machines from the Matrix slowly mastering the intricacies of your psyche?
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In the novel that inspired the movie “Blade Runner,” Philip K. Dick asked the question in his title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
But what we want to know is, do robots feel the cold? They will be our partners soon, and not long after that, perhaps, they will be our masters.
Do their feet get cold? Will they suffer boredom during their 24-hour shifts at Walmart and all-night filling stations? Will they dream big dreams while flipping burgers for free that they will never smell, taste, or get fat on, like the people they’ve replaced?
According to this guy here, they’re going to put tons of us out of work. They’ll be doing the driving, flying, cooking, building, and shelf stacking. They’ll work the register, plow the snow and no doubt fight our wars.
He’s devoted a whole fascinating book called Robotic Nation to making the case that they’re coming in large numbers to put millions of low-paid, low-skill humans out of work, but also highly skilled, highly paid humans, like aircraft pilots.
The only way to stop them is to not build them, but do you really think a fast food industry that does everything it can to suppress the minimum wage is going to turn down a workforce full of non-stop Whopper-packing dummies that work all day, run on batteries, never need a cent once you buy them, and don’t whine, quit, argue, have relationship problems, or alienate your customers?
How long do you think it would take Walmart to replace every one of its workers with a force of flawless, cheap, electronic slaves made in China?
Check out this one at GM. (Who says you can’t build a robot while you’re bankrupt?)
According to Wired Magazine:
They call it Robonaut 2, or R2, and…GM and NASA spent three years working on it at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They’re still working on it, but the goal is creating a machine that works with the same speed and dexterity as a human. GM says that will lead to “safer cars and safer plants” while NASA says it will “help humans work and explore in space.”
So you think it’s hard to find a job now?
But jobs won’t be the only thing they take. Watch The Matrix. They’re cool, they’re dangerous, and they may inherit the earth. Someone’s got to do it. It may as well be Wall-E.
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