Old friend Bob sent a link to a fascinating robot-oriented video. Here is a lightly-edited version of the email I sent to the folks on his small mailing list.

Here’s the link to the robot video. It’s quite interesting.

And my reply, lightly edited:

Very interesting. It seems pretty clear to me that the technology will let robots do most anything companies set their minds to accomplish. Right now, an Atlas would probably cost a million dollars. Probably too much to replace the people who recently replaced my roof… too much today, anyway.

When robots can replace my roof more cheaply than the company’s clearly imported labor force, the company will of course move to robots, and those people will no longer have jobs.

The problem is—one problem is—it seems to me, corporations have no incentive to take care of people, other than their owners. If they could rake in money without paying people, they will choose to do so. It’s only rational.

I am unlikely to last long enough to run out of money or otherwise have to deal with this concern. That is not true for my children, and their children. As things stand now, we are experiencing many harmful societal aspects: rapacious capitalism, oligarchy, corrupt politics, and fascism. It seems to me that we are well on our way to a Hunger Games stratification of society, unless things change radically, to a general ongoing concern for every human being, no matter where they are, what color they are, what gender they display, or whom they love.

I want to believe that the majority of people would support such a world. I want to believe that, I really do.

Can we get there with relatively low pain? Without a horrendous bloody revolution? I want to have hope, I really do.

But it’s hard.

Keep trying. Keep helping. Keep providing reason for hope.