Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, announced a few weeks back that he plans to make a prototype for a humanoid robot next year. It is expected to produce a 56kg robot that won't be too expensive to sell. Yes, the robot's commercial application is to completely replace the boring jobs Musk finds tedious. Similar to those who work in factories and supermarkets.
Some thought the announcement was a trolling. Musk's speech wasn't preceded by a dancer in dubstep costume, or that robotics companies have more skin in this long game than Tesla. They claim that the technology is not as good as Musks claims. This convenient moment of dance theatre happened amid a US Federal Investigation into Tesla self-driving vehicles after a series collisions with parked emergency cars.
Musk is a distraction artist, a troll or a deadly serious. His value now exceeds US$180bn (A$246bn). He has the money to make any idea he wants.
These have been used to fund admirable projects like Tesla cars or battery storage technology. PayPal is another example. The Tesla Bot is part of the Musk world. He has proposed launching a car into space and colonizing Mars. He also wants to wire electrodes into the brains of pigs. This is part of an effort to technologically facilitate a concept telepathy that will allow mankind to win in a future war with radical AI. It also envisions brain cavitation using a USB portal within the skull. Musk called it a FitBit to the brain. This is not a joke, I swear.
After watching Musks billionaires Richard Branson & Jeff Bezos engage in the first ever rocket-powered Battle of the Space Wangs it is time to assess how much control we allow unelected, self-indulgent billionaires over society and our lives.
The creation of the Tesla Bot reveals a disturbing truth: billionaires have been rewarded with inexplicable power for so many years that they don't know or care about the future of the world.
As with jobs. Although manufacturing has been a skilled and respectable job for many generations, the robot is not qualified to do the job of attaching bolts on cars using a spanner. Groceries collection from supermarkets is another example of robot-replacement. This has, despite its pay deprivations provided flexible work opportunities to people who have complex care obligations.
Musk's announcement did not include a plan for retraining the workforce. Musk's announcement was merely vague, suggesting that a costly, unpopular, and desocializing universal basic income scheme - which is the responsibility of governments and not corporations like his - might pick up the slack.
Jobs aren't about what you do. They're about how the workplace enriches the skills of the people around it. The depressing lack that socialisation is felt by large swathes Australians currently locked down by coronavirus, is the bleak and inertia hysteresis, a syndrome well-known by the long-term unemployed.
Given Musk's excitement about the impact that the Tesla Bot would have on the economy, it is likely that they will be more familiar with it than coronavirus. He said that the robot could fill labour shortages.
This is the appeal of the Tesla Bot to potential employers.
Musk's robot, as you can see, is electrified by neoliberalism.
Employers don't like labour shortages. This is because workers are able to demand fair wages and conditions. In the wake of Europe's bubonic plague, serfdom was ended in large parts of western Europe. Previously all-powerful land barons were forced into competition for the labourers who survived.
Similar effects are being experienced by the United States' coronavirus. The US Department of Labor estimates that there are currently more than 10,000,000 job opportunities. There are also suggestions that about one million jobs are available, but not enough workers to fill them.
Labour shortages have given workers the opportunity to bargain for wage increases or trade their current jobs for better-paying ones.
Musk's proposal of a low-cost Tesla robot, whose primary purpose is to steal it away, steps in to this rare opportunity for workers to regain some work ground.
It may be that the Silicon Valley mantra of "go fast and break things" is how unaccountable, screamingly wealthy brain-farters pretend to be punk rock. But, as a governing principle for society, what gets broken is people.
This isn't a neoliberal rant. The introduction of technology in healthcare didn't destroy nursing in Australia. This was because nurses unions had enough democratic support to allow their jobs to be improved by innovation and not destroyed by it. A democratic regulation can, must and should impose the necessary lines between entrepreneurship & aristocratic folly. Billionaires don't self-regulate.
However, a regulatory approach that waits for the horse to build a robot and then closes the stable door is not the best way to solve the problem.
The world we live in is limited in its resources. A system that allows a few people to pursue their own interests while ignoring the rest of us is not only dangerous, but also fails the majority.
There's an old-fashioned way of ensuring that resources in the west are managed safely under democratic control. Tax billionaires to the ground.
