In medieval times the landed gentry had serfs and slaves tend to their land to provide income for their masters. For most of human history, the wealthy have needed the poor to do the work that is necessary to run their businesses and make them even wealthier. Those ancient times seem so far away, but also are just as relevant. While we currently are not called serfs that term is now pejorative, we call ourselves employees.
Most of us answer to someone over ourselves. I answer to my clients, and tangently to the government. Employers are constantly looking for ways to cut their expenses and increase their margins. I have a manufacturing client who is slowly replacing all of his machines to newer models that will run 24/7 with limited human monitoring. So he will need less people and increase his productivity and margins.
We are getting to a point where literally just about everything can be done more cheaply and more efficiently by robots and machines. Once this occurs the elite will not have any use for the rest of us at all.
Competition with technology is apparently one of the reasons why wage growth has been so stagnant over the past couple of decades. The only way it makes sense for an employer to hire you is if you can do a job less expensively than some form of technology can do it. I am working with a NFP that let a consultant go because there was no return on their investment. Everyone needs to work at their bottom lines, or they may not survive.
Walmart Inc. the world’s largest retailer has a robot army and it is growing. It will add shelf-scanning robots to 650 more U.S. stores by the end of the summer, bringing its fleet to 1,000. The six-foot-tall Bossa Nova devices, equipped with 15 cameras each, roam aisles and send alerts to store employees’ handheld devices when items are out of stock, helping to solve a vexing problem that costs retailers nearly a trillion dollars annually, according to researcher IHL Group.
This is the future, where will we be in it…