Robots cannot survive automation

The general concern about our jobs being automated, and artificial intelligence (AI) taking over from human beings misses the fundamental basis of employment itself.

Over millenia, we have evolved an economic system that depends on conversion of one form of energy into another, to add value and facilitate commerce. It is an interplay of production, the buying and selling of “stuff’’ in order to sustain ourselves within the commercial framework we have created.

AI is a temporary aberration in our collective job market — -ultimately self-destructive because AI and robotic systems can only produce. It is a system with no means of consumption.

So as robotic systems destroy our employment base, they will themselves become unaffordable, because it is we, the ultimate consumer, who provide the commercial platform by which robots can be built and utilised.

the energy resources that drive them will become unavailable because it will not be possible to provide affordable forms of energy merely to produce “stuff’’ that no one can buy.

Or to simplify it further — -imagine every production process, every service fully automated and conventional employment reduced to a minimum, say 10% of what we have now; there would be nothing to generate the necessary prosperity to buy the goods/services they produced.

Governments are also part of the production-consumption circle, but a redundant workforce pays no taxes; as the workforce diminishes so will the tax base which governments need to function

Thus robots will make themselves redundant.