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What’s the Endgame of Automation?
what do you do when there’s no need to do?
Machine learning has been driving a new wave of automation in the past decade. The speed of this wave is up for debate, but its direction and strength are beyond doubt — for it is driven by good old economic interest.
It always helps to remember:
Corporations swarm towards profit surely as maggots to a corpse.
And unimaginable profit lies just beyond the mechanical horizon. The lauded principles of the Free Market move companies to pay workers the absolute minimum, so the idea of a worker that needs no wages is a utopian dream for every CEO with their souls oriented towards the bottom line.
Many economists are skeptical of the coming robotic revolution. They point out how humans have always been automating our work (the water wheel, for example), and we simply make new jobs to fill out the slack.
This is good, I will concede, so long as the displaced workers can find meaningful work afterwards. I don’t imagine this to be the case in the future.
We Live in the Beginning
With the rapid development of computer vision through convolutional neural nets, we’re rapidly approaching the age self-driving cars. To put that in…
