When Robots are Rights

We must, as thinking, contemplative beings at least somewhat concerned about the future, consider the implications of robotics and so-called artificial intelligence: machines that learn. It’s all a matter of large-enough databases and rapid-enough retrieval. So what? you might ask.

Civilization came to be built as it is through an economic reality that forces individual humans to strive for improvement – both personal and financial. That is, at one level or another, life has been tough for most of us, causing each to become stronger in order to be able to adjust one’s surroundings to greater comfort or safety… or both.

In the past century or so we have managed to elevate enough of ourselves to support elaborate industries designed only to entertain us due to growing levels of “leisure” time. That is, modern life for a large fraction of humankind (but not all, certainly) permits complete creation of safe and comfortable living conditions (standards) with about 40 hours of “labor” of very specialized kinds per week, or about 25% of available time.

In fact not even 25% is needed, as many forms of labor provide for weeks of non-work time each year in addition to “holidays,” storm-days, “personal” days, sick days and, increasingly, family and maternity “leave” periods. Politicians and other panderers – advocates and socialists of various stripes – are constant in their demands for more time off for ostensibly “civilized” and crucial purposes. Employers are, after all, mere thieves of workers time and comfort and must not be allowed to earn a profit from their labor, if such dis-allowance is at all possible.

In any case and by whatever fraction of productive employees’ time, businesses must find ways to produce the millions of products and services that they and others need or want in order to create and maintain the kind of safe, comfortable living conditions each desires. And those products must be profitable enough to justify all the investment, risk, work and education that goes in to producing them, delivering them and warranting their quality and usefulness, AND to permit sufficient taxation of both profits and of labor itself, to pay for all of the “public” works and subsidies that politicians think we need – including those that we truly do.

Together we, many of us, understand the multiple contracts and assumptions and personal costs that are enabling lives we like; and we understand, largely, the changes we must each choose to make to have “better” lives and proportions of leisure time. Robots are changing the “contracts” we have made between individuals, companies, governments and ourselves – and we are largely unprepared for the future that they are creating.

Right now the contracts of the economy depend upon parties who have striven to be part of the economy and who have striven to be “good” and “useful” people – most of us, anyway. What each has attained-to is the basis on which each of us judges the other as a qualified member of our society and culture, evaluates him or her as to qualities of charity, kindness and “fairness,” or lacks thereof, and on what his or her productive value is determined.

It is very important to us whether the person we are considering is one who “pulls his or her weight” or, barring genuine disability, “coasts on the work of others.” Is he or she “pulling the wagon” or just “riding?” Like it or not, every one of us needs to grasp these values for the current system to “work.” We understand and agree to abide by the hundreds and thousands of “contracts” that cause society, products, services, profit and pay to function with a net gain of living standards over time for the largest number of our fellow society members.

Are you with me so far?

Here and there, and in growing numbers, people who are employers, which is to say, producers in our economy (“job-creation” being simply a result of profitable productivity), are squeezed by governments – including their legal systems – through taxation and liabilities of increasing types. Customers demand redress and compensation from producers’ profits if anything goes wrong with a product, its delivery or its use, almost regardless of “fault.” Governments need more and more revenue to perform vital deeds and to buy votes from constituents.

To compensate for growing assaults on profits producers must steadily become more productive without raising costs… and this means reducing labor costs – employee costs. Given myriad labor laws protecting workers, insuring them, insuring their families and paying them at certain rates, producers are turning toward automating as many procedures as possible: ie. robots.

Robots don’t have to look like manufactured humanoids. They can be as unassuming as ATM machines and self-check-out lanes at Home Depot and a thousand other retailers. “Robots” can dispense prescriptions, take orders at fast-food restaurants and, soon, custom-tailor suits with nary a sales-clerk or store-manager needed. What do YOU do? What function are you compensated for? Maybe you build houses.

Robots make it possible to factory-manufacture modular homes that come with wiring, piping and alarm and computer circuits already in place. They’re delivered by truck and bolted together on site. Altogether there can be barely 20% as much labor needed to produce a single-family home. For modular multi-family buildings, there is even less per housing unit. What will all the tradesmen be doing?

Or, the counter workers, potato-fryers, and on, and on, and on… what will they be doing? Retailing is disappearing before our eyes, along with its jobs and buildings, janitors and re-decorators, security guards and on, and on, and on. There are very, very few jobs that are not threatened, except, temporarily, robot-maker.

Will this happen overnight? Not yet, but overnight began about 30 years ago and is accelerating as rapidly today, tomorrow and next week, as computing power and miniaturization permit. So what are the political and human consequences of the robotic devouring of what we now call “jobs?”

First, people who now control productive enterprises, from small to large, will be controlling larger and larger fractions of production generally, whether of precision-engineered parts or of sandwiches, and with fewer and fewer employees. This will concentrate productive surplus – which is to say: profits – and wealth as well, in those same hands or corporations. How, under the U. S. Constitution, will this wealth be “shared” among the soon-to-be jobless citizens? (“Soon” being in 20 years?)

Shall we raise taxes much, much higher? Should laws be passed that require producers to share remaining jobs among 4, 5 or 6 individuals (however inefficient that will be)? What happens to the essential right of private property? Will all hiring and profits become the purview of the least-efficient institutions on the planet: federal bureaucracies?

And how will individuals prove their worth? Not only to their friends, wives and children… but to themselves? If lots of humans don’t need to be very smart to survive, will more than the owners of production and the builders and programmers of robots, bother to become so? What happens to politics, then?

The stratification we have acquiesced to so far – stratification in which those elected deem themselves superior and entitled to office, ideas they have “sold” to relatively ignorant constituents – will become stricter and more calcified, virtually unassailable by the welfare-supported masses of citizens. Those will be they who never vote against wealth-sharing and at ever greater sharing rates. How will democracy or a republic or religiosity survive?

Just as large fractions of us, now, can’t find our ways without “GPS,” or feed ourselves without welfare, what will we become when there is no need to strive… and dependence upon robots approaches totality? What will civilization be? Constant leisure? A complete absence of sacrifice? SHALL WE ALL BECOME ENTERTAINERS? Shouldn’t we be thinking about these things?

Do you think of them? Fear them?

TOLERANCE, LOGICALLY


There is definitely a logic to modern immigration non-policies and protests. One could be justified in his or her puzzlement as to why criminals might be valued above the law abiding, even by “official” agencies of domestic law-enforcement. Some logic is shouted from the streets, some we’ll have to impute, but there is a logical platform underpinning apparent disconnectedness of immigrant “advocates.”

There would be MORE logic if every advocate were a non-citizen. Being allowed to gain new comforts and benefits that are not available in one’s own country is, logically, something to strive for. Like everyone else – every single member of the human race – people who sneak into a better country or economy are CAPITALISTS! That is, each will gain as much as possible for as little effort as possible. Once gained, the “possessions” one has are reason, of themselves, to defend one’s ownership thereof. That is, “possession” is 99/100ths of the “law” (of possession). Are we going in circles, here?

Well, yes. But there is a certain logic for the possessing individuals. What about “Sanctuary” logic? Heated protesters and their elected officials make a case for “fear avoidance.” That is, people who have snuck into the United States are, in theory, subject to legal sanctions for having broken Federal laws, and they “fear” being found and found-out. Their friends and families, legal residents and non-legal, and the self-recognized and self-created “agencies” that earn their livings working to connect non-legal residents to various welfare benefits, ESL classes and, unfortunately, contrived documentation – like drivers licenses – are on the front lines demanding “justice” for their fellow humans, laws be damned.

Municipal officials claim that these “fearful” non-legal residents won’t report crimes they have knowledge of if they are so fearful of being found-out and forced to go home to their own country. Nothing is said about reporting crimes of other non-legal residents who will likely escape prosecution simply because of their illegal status! MOST countries are NOT as pleasant to live in as is the U. S. Numbers of less-nicely-living people exceed 3 BILLION. How many are entitled to the largesse and safety of the United States? Logically, I mean.

Well, immigrant activists say, there shouldn’t be artificial borders; the World belongs to all of us. There may be logic behind that statement, but there are some sort of borders that come under the definition of human rights, aren’t there? Are strangers, or aliens, entitled to other individuals’ personal property? Even non-legal residents would object to a family of unknown, unrelated strangers moving into their homes and taking their income, wealth, food and personal space. That sounds logical.

There is a perverse sort of logic, not stated but accepted in practice, that stealing from the United States nation isn’t really stealing, like, from another person… I mean, honestly. There are a lot of U. S. citizens that believe the same foul thing! Still, illegal entrants are stealing forms of wealth that belong to U. S. citizens, and these include, in most cases, direct food, education, medical, housing and others kinds of costly aid that our new “residents” have not earned, paid-for, or deserve in any way except emotionally.

A new logic then is brought to bear: refugee status… and asylum. The U. S. since the end of WW-II has codified processes for EM-igrants: forced to leave their homes because of war. These are they who emigrate for essentially non-elective reasons; émigrés from Cambodia and Viet-Nam are excellent examples. The United States, responsible for much of the immediate destruction of Viet-Nam, Laos and Cambodia, helped tens of thousands of émigrés from Southeast Asia come to the U. S. and resettle in somewhat concentrated neighborhoods, mostly in cities or proximate suburbs.

What happened? Within a year or two our new residents had positive impacts on their local economies. Apartment sharers would combine for one car so that the adults could get to work; extended female family-members watched children for one another. Kids learned English without bi-lingual crutches and within a decade we had a host of “new Americans” whose cultural communities and religious philosophies were NOT purposefully antithetical to our Constitution and our Judeo-Christian legal system. One need look only at their children and grandchildren as they give valedictory and salutatory speeches.

There were both logical and charitable reasons to encourage and accept Southeast Asian immigrants. There is only an emotional justification for accepting large numbers of Muslim refugees. We want to believe that the wonderfulness of U. S. society will cause all degrees of Muslims to become more secular, less fundamental about Islam and to live like their new neighbors. For a nation premised on religious “freedom,” depending upon a softening of religious fervor seems oxymoronic – if not moronic.

Islam teaches dominance over, or death for, infidels. The prime infidels are Jews and Christians. I can see a problem. CAIR describes Islam and the Quran as mostly faith, sweetness and light. They bend over to reference Abraham, David, Jesus and Mary as if we are all brothers in belief and tradition. But history teaches otherwise.

Most, I mean in the order of a billion and more Muslims, will never take up arms against their neighbors, behead a nun in Africa or a reporter in Pakistan. Most don’t spend their days in hatred. On the other hand, they won’t fight too hard against their real faith-brothers who do. Islam, by credo, intends to replace all other belief structures because God commands it; Mohammed said so. “Religious freedom” is anathema to the Quran as are all forms of secular governance and lifestyles. And Muslims mean to carry out the dictates of the Quran.
Well, I can respect their adherence to their faith – I’m an American. Live and let live. But, I’m also conservative. I believe in the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus Christ and the lessons of personal responsibility that the Bible, and our Declaration of Independence and Constitution embody. What ye sow, so shall ye reap… so MUST ye reap.

Christianity has undergone significant reformation not because of what the New Testament says, but because of abuses by the Catholic Church, politically, financially, powerfully. Little by little, sometimes ‘bigly,’ the Church has shifted while the basis of Christianity has not. Yet, make no mistake, Western civilization is dependent upon the success and survival… and integrity, of the Catholic Church. Fortunately, its self-destructiveness seems to be lessening.

“America” became what it did because of Mosaic and Christic principles. It also has failed in many areas because of human failing to follow those and our own laws. In the past hundred years, or so, we have found ways to talk ourselves OUT OF our Judeo-Christian principles by cleverly playing our own words against them… against ourselves. Legalized abortion is a clear example; separation of church and state is another.

We’ve given up our right to exercise judgment, and become afraid to exercise or even honor Christianity. Muslims have never relinquished Islam – every jot and tittle of it. In our amorphous philosophies we invite Muslims to live among us as if they, too, will become amorphous in their philosophies, yet, in our legalistic anti-Christian wasteland, we can’t even TALK about threats to our culture and heritage. The only sin left is intolerance.

So we tolerate, tolerate, tolerate until we’ve become able to argue for automatic citizenship for illegal entrants. Breaking laws and standing, publicly – even by elected officials – against their enforcement, is celebrated. A majority of states elected a president who battles to restore the rule of law and our Constitution, whose wife has the courage to say a prayer in public, and thousands protest in the streets. God save us.