Around the world there are countless examples of unethical labour practices that big corporations take advantage of for western societal benefit. They pray on the poor to fuel the numerous import export businesses; this is mainly due to its convenience and cost effectiveness. Social media loves to cherry pick these stories to highlight these practices and scrutinize everything about the process, all while tweeting from an iPhone. Why do I bring this up? Because its hypocrisy, organizations like apple and google are notorious for using child labour in the gathering of resources to put together our phones in the first place. Something we’ve been able to compartmentalize over the years.
So would if we could take those people out of these harsh work environments entirely, and replace them with an emotionless, intelligent, relentless robotic workforce? This lines up with our ethical concerns since we are not putting human life at risk whilst still turning out resources at efficient rates. Seemingly a win-win for consumers and producers. So where does all the fear and anxiety fit in? Once again this comes at the expense of third world countries. Let me explain.
A lot of these grueling jobs are opportunities to generate income for people that otherwise have none. Though the physical demand outweighs the reward greatly, it is better than nothing. Which is what they would have if we cycle them out for an exclusively robot workforce. Its these people who will fear losing their job because opportunity is as scarce as food, financial aid, and clean water. It would lead to historically high poverty that I believe would extinguish entire populations of small countries. And the worst part is these people wouldn’t even know what was happening, until its already happened.
A robot revolution doesn’t seem as plausible in the Hollywood movie sense as we’ve romanticized the idea of creating man’s new best friend for some time now. Yet we never see the slow implementation in these movies that lead to the downfall of human power, where the growing anxiety is soon to blossom. Although it may be more depressing movie, from where I see it the most plausible technological take over wouldn’t be in a supreme leadership, I see a new age industrial revolution. My question is how much we will be able to compartmentalize then, only time will tell.