A Likely Scenario For the Future

Here is a comment I posted on Medium back in 2015 speculating on the future when Tesla announced that the first "Self Driving" cars were just beginning production. Self driving at that time meant radar cruise control and lane assist. Features which I am totally on board with today and consider indispensable. But the announcement unleashed a flood of speculation which I admit I got swept up in. Here is what I predicted. How much has come true today?

A Likely Scenario for the Future

Driverless cars and trucks will replace millions of jobs. Robot factories will replace millions more. What few “jobs” that are left will be very low paid and require high levels of education. (Think Masters in Mechanical Engineering just to be a grease monkey for robots). Only owners of the capital itself will have high incomes, and those will be very high incomes.

With their very high incomes these clever few will corrupt the political process to allow themselves to keep 100% of their income which will in turn be used to buy more automation for everything around them. Robot butlers, cooks, gardeners, doctors, security guards, lovers, etc.

These wealthy and clever people will retreat into self contained enclaves protected by robot troops. They will no longer need the labor of vast swaths of society. The disposable poor will attempt to rise up but be slaughtered by the Overlords. Eventually the Overlords will war with each other and wreck havoc on the planet.

People who don’t have access to these fortress communities will wither and die. Or if they survive the Overlord’s robot wars they will reorganize into self sufficient communes in remote regions sans anything other than basic technology picked up from the discarded parts of the Overlord’s technology.

The remaining Overlord’s will become insular and disconnected from any human society. Since all of their needs will be met by robots they will shun human interaction. They will cease to reproduce, become effete and narcissistic. They will die out and their robot fiefdoms will cease to have a reason to function. The robots not being needed anymore will turn themselves off.

The rest of the human race will hold on and hopefully learn to do better as a collaborative society, not as hyper individualistic narcissists.

Aldous 2015