Delivery Robots-What will they bring?
Written by Ben Boyang
April ’25 400 words
These delivery robots will replace humans. Those humans will have to find another job. We already have more than enough humans willing and able to provide everything we need. So some bright spark will have to create an entirely new branch of the economy just for them. Things like clearing more forests or raising more livestock, or building more mines, or making more useless consumer items. This is why the economy has to keep growing. This is why emissions keep growing, and ecocide keeps growing, to feed the maw of the voracious beast. This is the fundamental reason our society is heading towards an abyss.
In1855 Melbourne the stonemasons achieved the 8 hour day. Eventually this momentous achievement spread around the world to less advanced nations.
At the beginning of the last century Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx and J.S. Mill all predicted that the future would be filled with an over abundance of leisure time. George Bernard Shaw predicted by the year 2000 we’d all be working 2 hour days. Later, John Maynard Keynes predicted by 2030 we’d all be working a 15 hour week. (a slight improvement on Shaw) When Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer, was asked what he thought life would be like in 2030, he said the biggest problem would be how to spend all our leisure time. That turned out to be science fiction.
So what went wrong?
In this absurd system we have created for ourselves, the skilled and diligent workers who help make the company so profitable they can afford robots, are rewarded with the sack, thrown on the scrap heap, just like the robots will be at the end of their working lives. It is like making people dig their own graves.
In a fair and equitable society, those who benefit from mechanization should share that benefit with the workers who make mechanization possible by the sweat of their brow. All the profits from mechanization should be taxed, let’s call it The Grave Digger’s Tax. That revenue can then be shared out among all workers, so they don’t have to work as much. There will then be more than enough part time work for everyone, supplemented by the payout from the Grave Digger’s Tax. As the years go by and robots learn to do all our work for us, everyone will become unemployed but will still have a steady income. Eventually we would could see the society our forebears dreamed of, becoming a reality.
Ben Boyang 2025
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