Robot Non-Wars

Printers never waged war on pens, they simply made pens redundant.

I suspect that if robots ever take over, we’ll go the way of the pen rather than the dodo.

Once machines can bake bread, calculate the proper tax rate and generally take care of what needs done, and do so cheaply, humanity can take a breather. I’m not sure if we actually will take that breather, as some people seem determined to work even when it’s not necessary, or at least determined that others should work.

Walking without a Map

Picture a young person taking a random walk, with no destination. She moves outside, ignores the cries from her phone which complain she has not set a destination, and simply walks forward.

At first she’s blocked by a highway for robots. It’s mostly like any other road, but just for machines. They move quickly, and coordinate perfectly. Road works happen while various vehicles and other units move around the road-maintenance droids at 100 kmph.

She decides to try a different route, and quickly finds herself at a warehouse of some kind. The fence is tall, but has degraded, and nobody has seen any need to fix it. She breaks the rusty metal with a few kicks, then enters the area.

Inside, under the roof, railings cover the floor, about a meter high, and another set a meter above that. Various droids move across the area, slowly. She steps on.

She knows the droids probably have some basic sensors, but they have no need to avoid humans, so they might just bang into her. She wobbles along the metal lines that the robots are designed to navigate comfortably, and jumps out of the way of one coming towards her.

The wooden floorboards beneath the canopy of metal has become rotten. Nobody has had any use of a floor in this place for decades. If she falls through, she might find concrete, or might fall to her death somewhere deep under those rotten floorboards. She thinks about heading in another direction.

A police-drone floats down noiselessly, and tells her she has been fined 30 credits for the intrusion. She knows she can look up a longer explanation on her phone, then appeal the ruling with an app, but decides to just head back home instead.

The credits lie with the computers - they seem to belong to the computers more than to people already.

She wonders for a brief moment about overthrowing the robots, but the thought can’t get too far. She can’t record the idea, or research it without drawing attention to herself. She wouldn’t know how to make food for herself - it all comes in plastic boxes.

The population has already declined some time ago, when VR started to take care of sexual needs. Humanity would never need to be attacked by a single machine; they had simply become irrelevant.