Extinction

At a museum: “Look, honey,” “This is what men and women looked like in ancient times.”

“What happened to them?”, a mechanical child asks its mechanical mother.

“They are extinct.” Bion says to her daughter, creation. “They were not efficient, wore out easily and always needed rest, and to eat to sustain themselves. They often got emotional while working and could not function properly, when they did. Every little thing affected them and hindered their functionality. They became obsolete.”

Yep, you are sitting on the couch reading this and imagining, if that could ever be possible. Off the cuff, I’d say no. But I think a better reaction would be, maybe.

You head over to McDonalds for lunch, you go inside and see no one. Not one person in the entire building, except for a couple in the corner of the dining area, enjoying a meal. You stand in a room with floor to ceiling panels, where you are required to place your order, then step aside to the next area to collect your food.

You find yourself with a cart full of food at a grocery store, and realize there is no one to ring you up. You have to do it yourself. Or maybe you head to a box store and don’t have to checking out. As you pass through the archway, everything on your cart has been rung up. Your bank account instantly pays for the goods.

Maybe, you are knocked out on a hospital table, surgical suite and your doctor is playing Operate Now Hospital, with your body while he or she is in their office with a laptop and a couple of joysticks, or golfing at Pebble Beach, while you are filleted on a stainless steel gurney with all kinds of thong protruding from you .

It maybe a far fetched idea, right now, but we are heading in that direction, and fast. Robots are already conducting surgeries. And yes the doctor is manipulating controls to make the robotic surgeon perform your surgery. No way? Yes way. In fact it is already happening.

Robotic surgeries account for 22% of surgeries in the USA alone, growing at a rate of 15% annually. That is 750,000 surgeries in a year, in the states alone with a whopping 2.6 million worldwide. The robots are not completely autonomous, but they will be. Technology is moving at light speed and making it a possibility, to have surgical procedures done without a surgeon. The rate of reduce op time and decrease complications from surgery by 30 percent. There is a push to keep the technology faster.

We, apparently in the very near future, will have no need for a license, because cars are just about at the point, where they can drive themselves. License. obsolete.

The box stores are already testing the scanner arch, at which point you just roll the cart under it to exit and get charged for the items.

Ai and robotics are changing the way everything is and will be done. People, are already obsolete in many industries. Factories have robots pulling, packing, and filling orders. Machines sort goods and mail, build everything from computers to cars, without the aid of human hands, and they even harvest fruits, milk cows, and seed crops.

Sure, they all tell you that it improves quality, enhances employee safety, increase productivity. Let’s break that down shall we?

Quality control, is all well and good, but the machine cannot make a subjective decision yet. Can it? Maybe, maybe not. Improving productivity is not a stretch, because let’s face it, a thing, can work 24/7 and requires no food, drink, or bathroom breaks. It has no drama going on in its life, because really, it doesn’t have one. The worker safety issue are these; employees are the largest expense in a business. Their salary, isn’t the only reason. They need insurance, disability, supervision (other paid employees), and in some cases other benefits. Robots need none of those things and have no emotional entanglements that get in their way. They don’t call in sick, ever, because they don’t get sick. These are all great for the employer and their bottom line, but no good for you and me.

Every industry is being affected, and bots are everywhere. I do think they have a purpose in life, but not at the expense of humans, and that is what is happening. Humans barely ever, answer phones or respond to us on phones. We only are allowed to email a concern, or live chat with an Ai bot that will answer all your questions. With Ai, they now even have very realistic voices, and human like cadence, and the added benefit that they remain calm and passive when confronted with aggression or angry customers.

I get the attraction, for a business and even science. There is no human error, and actually no error at all , because, well, they aren’t human. Human error costs business lots of money. This all seems like good news. In many cases it is, and will prove to be continuing onward, but what about the employees, the human ones.

You are already seeing the effects of progress, everywhere. Supermarkets and box stores now have only a few employees. Why hire a checker, when you are perfectly capable and they don’t have to pay you or worry about about your insurance, worker’s compensation, if you get hurt, and they don’t have to worry about having the right staff available for scheduling. They get a fatter bottom line and profits, while you get nothing, not even a discount for having to ring up and bag your own food. But the largest impact is on the employee, who no longer has a job. He/she has become obsolete.

Ai and robots can replace just about anything in the future. Doctors will be obsolete. They already have virtual attendant visits. Surgeons, obsolete. Drivers obsolete, any kind of manufacturers, obsolete, teachers, servers, cooks, fitness instructors, actors, musicians, and a whole slurry or repair techs, all obsolete. Are we getting the picture?

What do all these hundreds of millions of people do now? Unemployment will sky rocket. But guess what? There won’t wont be unemployment benefits, because there is no employment to begin with. I don’t think anyone is thinking about that. That benefit is paid into a fund for the employees, by the employers, just in case they loose their jobs, if not at fault for the status.

What then? Well the government will have to subsidize the unemployed with entitlements, and you know where that comes from, if you even have the basic two year old comprehension. Yes, taxes. tax, tax, tax. We will all have to pay for it. But wait there is a problem. The taxed pool gets smaller and smaller as people continue to lose their livelihood, and there are less people to tax, so guess what? Ding, ding, ding! You are the winner, if you said the few left that do have taxable income will be taxed at unprecedented levels. Even they, at some point will be out of work and not taxable.

This creates a monster problem of people, human ones, needing sustenance and income to live purposeful lives. If you don’t need teachers, then you don’t need superintendents. Don’t need service workers, doctors, manufacturers, customer service reps, warehouse workers, train engineers, or any other physical labor attached to any of these fields,

By now you are thinking, well they will need people to service the bots, repair people, artists, writers, musicians, actors, models, historians, librarians, etc., but no they won’t.

Ai robots, artificial people, for the politically correct sticklers, will know and be able to service other robots. They will be able to repair anything once they know the logistics of how, which can be taught to them by other robots. Artists will be obsolete, they already being outdone by Ai, and will be able to created things we as artists, will never be able to. Writers, well let’s just day that every request for a written piece now come with explicit instructions NOT, to submit anything created with the help of Ai. Ai is doing it better than we can. It has not mastered the intensity and depth of what love is, but I believe it will, even if without a heart in the game.

No entertainment will be left untouched. Musicians have already been replicated, and if you have Spotify, or another music app, you can easily find the Ai singers, bands, and music. I have to admit, that I have more than a few songs, but Ai artists, that I was shocked to find were not actually real. Even so, the music is superb and I keep them on my playlists. The only nice thing about Ai musicians or bands is that there is not drama, no scandals, no bed hopping, drug or spousal abuse magazine fodder. They are clean cut.

Actors and models, obsolete. If you have not played with Ai, you have yet to realize the technology already exists to invent and created an entire human being. They can be made to do or say anything, need no contracts or millions of dollars salaries, and you have the added pleasure of not having to read about how degenerate they are, or how many pervert’s lists they are on. They look and behave just like a real person and you will never know the difference. Their limitations only in aptitude of the hands of the creators. Their god so to speak.

The frightening part of Ai and the creation of people, is not a new persona being created, but the fact that anyone that is a public figure, can be copied and recreated over anyone else. What I mean it this, Ai can in live time show you a live representation of anyone and it will look like the real person. In my five part piece on internet scams, I describe how it looks, how it’s done, and how they use it.

There will be no need for historians, librarians, teachers and billions of other careers or jobs, because Ai can and will be able to create, recreate, improve upon, mimic, and even invent anything we can ever comprehend. If you don’t need them and there are no jobs or careers, then why do we need an education? Why would we have children, if there are no prospects for a happy future and life?

So what happens to us, other than financially? We will probably lose our drive and purpose in life. Think about it, what would your purpose be without something to strive toward during your life. I believe that the eventuality, of all of these little “improvement in our lives”, because that is how they will sell you the sparkling gem, is that there will be a huge amount of mental health issues. Humans are not created to sit and do nothing. That’s when we humans begin getting into trouble. Nothing good there, that’s for sure.

It gets just a bit worse. We are already seeing Ai videos everywhere we turn of things that are seemingly impossible, but there we have it in color and live proof. The problem is, that almost everything you now are seeing online is fake and one hundred percent AI, and people are buying it 1000%. They will argue you to the ground that it’s real. People! An owl doesn’t bring you injured little animals to help and heal. It is a predator and is designed to seek, hunt and consume its prey. Any injured, anything is not going to get the sympathy and empathy card from a predator. Nature’s motto is survival of the fittest. The weak die the strong live.

That brings us to the biggest problem of all. If we buy the lie we see and hear with our own eyes, how do we discern manipulation, deceit, control. We won’t be able to. Think about it. Our governments can created anything at all, say anything at all and make us believe. They have a precedent already and know they can order us to do anything they want. Remember Covid? I won’t get into conspiracy theories or truths, but if they controlled our comings and goings, how we came and went and what were able to do in our daily lives, they will have no compunction to reign that in for any number of power plays. For goodness sake, they had us over a barrel and at their whim, for almost a year, and we all droned, “yes master, yes master” that whole time.

Some people are still traumatized by that period in our unfortunate history.

Entities with illicit intentions, will use Ai to create any number of visuals that we will fall for. We will be controlled, by the power players and by the power hungry. Power corrupts and this will help them get what they want. period.

Look, Ai is not all bad. I create art. I draw, paint, and color with adult crayons (colored pencils), and I personally use Grok to animate my work for posting online aside, the static work. I do embrace the creative part of Ai. It makes my drawings come to life and gives the observer a view at art in motion. It actually engages more people to want to admire the work, and experience art. Today’s generation doesn’t spend much time contemplating art. So, in this kind of application, it is useful, and fun and attractive to them and maybe they give a second glance. Maybe they even like it and enjoy the experience. That is a plus in the Ai column.

The negatives, I see, however, outweigh the positives. I think we have created a monster that, in the end will eat us alive, metaphorically speaking in real life. The unreal destroying the real. Hm. A scary movie pitch. To me these are the frightening possibilities. In the end, we will be obsolete and unneeded. Do we even exist, then?