Our Coming Robot Utopia

What happens when many, perhaps the majority, of the tasks required to operate a corporation, or a government department, can be run more efficiently by machines? Who will benefit first from these dynamics, and what will they likely do with this new power?

We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can.

But there’s a deeper, unasked question that lingers in the background, one introduced by the unconventional thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti in the early 1980s: “If the machine can take over everything man can do, and do it still better than us, then what is a human being, what are you?”