Stop Freaking Out About Robots
Automation need not be stirred into a doom-laden soup along with Trump and climate change. Here are three reasons why we should welcome the march of the robots.
By Kevin McCullagh
A 2017 New Yorker cover by R. Kikuo Johnson painted a dystopian scene. Robots pace and trundle past a homeless human kneeling at their feet, while one deigns to lower its gaze to flip a few coins in his cup. The image expressed perfectly the pervading, and misplaced, pessimism around the impacts of automation not just among East Coast sophisticates, but across the U.S. and the developed world. In fact, it is a view that has even infiltrated one of the last pockets of optimism about the future: the wide-eyed utopianism of Silicon Valley.
When even the technorati are starting to agonize over the future of artificial intelligence and the perils of automation, you have to wonder. Elon Musk–often a champion of the human ability to improve its condition through material progress–is becoming…
