The Rise of the Machines

Hardly a day goes by without some new article describing the very rapid advance of automation in our lives. As it is right now, more and more manufacturing is done using computer-controlled machining and robots doing the assembling and even testing. We can’t call for customer assistance anymore without going through a battery of mechanical voices asking us which option we want while directing us away from any hope of human interaction. Machines are accurate, dependable and they never sleep. They don’t belong to unions and they never complain about working conditions and best of all for the Captains of Industry, they are relatively cheap: after initial acquisition, all they cost is the power to run them and the minor costs of upkeep and upgrades.

The problem that emerges is where that puts people. We all have some children who are nice, average young men and women who are capable of putting in a good day’s work but aren’t gifted with vast intellect or inspiration – in a word, average. We would consider ourselves lucky sometimes if they could find a good, solid blue collar job. Except those jobs – and many so-called white collar jobs – are disappearing.

Beside mechanization, the big money companies are outsourcing like madmen to cheaper labor overseas or in some cases, importing overseas workers to fill the spots that our sons and daughters would have filled. We even have news that Disney, that paragon of fresh-scrubbed American values, has been busily replacing American with foreign and then, after the displaced Americans are required to train their replacements, the fired Americans are prohibited from seeking other employment with Disney. Wow. Sure makes me want to go out and buy that next movie!

Not more interesting. More dumb.

Computer systems generally are inflexible and not error-tolerant. When erroneous information is input by mental dwarfs it is accepted as true. Generally the systems designers did not include a way to correct data.

The data is propagated into other databases and accessed by other systems.

It is much easier to die than to get the information changed.

The solution has to be some sort of plan for the future that recognizes the value of all of our children and helps them with specific education and directions to use their individual talents.
The solution is for radical downsizing of government and the returning of many millions of federal employees to the private sector by firing them without any recompense or residuals and by eliminating thereby all the alphabet agencies and the rules they enforce and eliminating the taxes on business and any government involvement in medicine or insurance or welfare of any sort. That is free trade without government crushing burdens laid on it. If all that could happen then the economy would boom in a curve exponentially steeper than any economic curve in past history and the people put out of work by the machines would be creating more and more enterprises and ways to make money and employ real people. Then eliminate all federal taxes except for either a flat as hell ,say, 9% income tax from the first dollar of earned income with no deductions/exemptions, credits or any other modifications, or by imposing a totally consistent flat 10% tariff on all imports, which is the Constitutionally sanctioned method of revenue raising for the government.

It ain't gonna happen. Government is all about enriching professional thieves and embezzlers and satisfying the power hungry. Constitutional restraints such as were enacted by the Founder can succeed for a couple of centuries in a population of self-sufficient people. We are at the end of that process.

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