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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 4 August 2009

In 1995, the rate at which U.S. corporations were eliminating jobs was two million annually. More than 75 percent of workers in most of the industrial nations are performing work that is primarily simple and repetitive. As of 2003, in the United States, out of 124 million workers, more than 90 million jobs were at risk for replacement by machines. As of the early 1990s, approximately 3.6 billion people (67%) in the world lacked adequate cash or credit to purchase goods and services. As Barnet and Cavanagh (1994) state: “A huge and increasing proportion of human beings are not needed and will never be needed to make goods or to provide services because too many people in the world are too poor to buy them” (p. 17). With automated machinery and robots taking over, there is the very real possibility of a permanent underclass consisting of hundreds of millions, if not several billion people. Nobel laureate, Wassily Leontief, states that “the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.” This unprecedented global travesty will create a worldwide situation in which upwards of 80% of the world will be unemployed or underemployed. With several billion people unable to find work, what will prevent society from disintegrating into a state of perpetual lawlessness and chaos? Other ominous predictions regarding robots include the concern that when artificial intelligence is developed, these robots may be given similar rights to humans, including the right to vote. An Ominous Glimpse into the Future of Human Labor

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