Dev.SN

Bill Gates: Prepare to be Assimilated

posted by janrinok on Monday March 17 2014, @08:03PM   
from the borg-revisited dept.

sl4shd0rk writes:

"Bill Gates says everyone needs to prepare to be out of work in 20 years due to Robots/software taking over most jobs. In preparation for this, Gates recommends people 'should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans' and reduce operating overhead for businesses by 'eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also not raising the minimum wage'. Bill Gates, you may recall, is the former CEO of Microsoft whose business acumen has brought the technology sector such things as Metro, Windows Phone and Xbox One.

BusinessInsider took a similar theme earlier this year."

• Re:I'll believe it when I see it Re:I'll believe it when I see it (Score: 5, Interesting) by naubol on Monday March 17 2014, @10:14PM

  by naubol (1918) on Monday March 17 2014, @10:14PM (#17903)

  To be pedantic, "circenses", but I take your point. However, unlike the grain dole for the capite censi, if we can automate everything via robotics, we might not even need executives. We certainly won't have to go to war constantly, enslave millions of people to farm our provinces and latifundia, and become utterly broke when not enough people are involved in the production of value. Sufficiently advanced automation is a force multiplier and may some day be self-sustaining, so the model of Roman degeneracy may not apply.

  Hopefully, we use this power to create the greatest welfare state ever devised and become a creative economy, something akin to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria [wikipedia.org] but with hopefully far more touchy feely.

  I see it as more likely to go the other way, that robot armies will be in the hands of a few who will then proceed to do what most humans with unlimited power would do: eugenics. I don't fear an AI that hasn't evolved a prime directive to keep itself alive and to reproduce, I fear the person who gets his hands on the singularity.

  And now, I'm really hoping that isn't Bill Gates.

  In the interim, we are already experiencing the dichotomy of needing less people than ever to generate insane amounts of food and yet still we have starving people and bicker over providing them sustenance. Locke, with his theory of property, would probably say we are being immoral and no longer have a right to have property when we control it in such a way as to prevent men from having reasonable access to the means of survival. Who can blame them if they should become criminal in our system of law and order? I hope that the majority of us are not turned into criminals by this process, but I think it the more likely scenario.

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• Re:I'll believe it when I see it (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:32AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:32AM (#18128)

  but I don't want to be killed by a robot just because I can't speak the solarian dialect perrrfectly....

  Parent