Bloody robots! Coming over here ... taking all our jobs ...

I'm getting more than a little bored of hearing all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about robots soon taking most of the jobs. 

Getting robots to fulfil our basic Maszlow needs is only an existential threat if we buy into the idea that we invariably need to pay someone in order to exist on this physical plane (and this is an idea we have been robustly encouraged to subscribe to throughout the ages - but that's another story for another time). This is a critical point in human evolution (as we all know!). 

I should make it clear that I'm not at all in favour of the forced redistribution of wealth from other human beings who have worked hard to amass it but the work of robots is a different kind of energy exchange. Whatever corporate entity has the means to build robots to take away menial labour irrespective of our wishes only serves to create an economy in which there are almost no customers (i.e. a moribund one). At this point it either becomes a naked, tyrannical master-slave relationship or the true free market kicks in to correct things. 

If robots start generating all the food and building all the shelter, yet not distributing the overwhelming surplus to the enormous slice of humanity they have made obsolete, who *are* they giving it to? A correction would be inevitable, by hook or by crook. So to speak.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay