Submitted by David Galland via The Passing Parade
One of the more interesting mental exercises related to predicting the future involves trying to fathom the impact the rise of robots will have on humanity.
We can be quite sure that in the proverbial blink, robots will be doing all the war fighting. After that, what’s the point? But does that then lead to the sort of robotic apocalypse so well envisioned in Terminator?
Submitted by Emily Zanotti via HeatSt.com,
A study by a British think tank, Reform, says that 90% of British civil service workers have jobs so pointless, they could easily be replaced by robots, saving the government around $8 billion per year.
Moments ago a federal judge blocked health insurer Anthem from acquiring rival Cigna, the second court ruling in recent weeks to deal a decisive blow to health insurers seeking consolidation as a cure to the substantially higher operating costs plaguing the industry as a result of Obamacare. The ruling echoed a decision by a different judge last month who blocked Aetna’s plans to take over Humana. Though the two proposed insurer combinations were different in many ways, both judges found that merging top industry rivals threatened higher prices without the necessary patient benefits to of
McDonalds replacing minimum-wage workers with "Big Mac ATMs"; Coffee stores replacing low-paid barristas with robots, and now Bank of America opening branches with no workers at all.
According to Reuters, the latest trend when it comes to retail banking is to do what every other industry is doing, and eliminate paid labor entirely. In that vein, Bank of America, has opened three completely automated branches over the past month, "where customers can use ATMs and have video conferences with employees at other branches."
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
What is going to happen to society when robots are able to do just about everything better, faster and cheaper than human workers can?