old technologies don't really go away is the thing, they hang round forever and we can still use them if we like. so mambo is kind of a goofy example (it's been goofy the whole time; it was goofy when i was 13, all the songs were goofy at the time. everything was some kind disco euro pop on the cusp of this new era, this being the music we were sure we would need) but um - we can still use them, this is something i keep saying.
so what im trying to get at with talking about the robots is that we (by which i mean, human companies) can almost but not quite afford to get rid of human agents and replace them with much cheaper robot versions. like, technology services instead of the traditional people based services. we've been doing this a long time.
my go-to examples would be:
-the train cards that they make you use (in my city, and i think everywhere) in order to buy digital tickets (my city is not an early adopter in fact they usually move backwards, creating unique and terrible thought technologies no-one actually needs, new and exciting ways to fuck over the citizen)
-uber, the service that replaces taxis with crowdsource, putting taxi drivers out of business and perhaps forcing them to become uber drivers, and then the self-driving car, which will replace uber in less than ten years, is my guess. the self driving car will put anyone who drives for a living out of business.
-the autotellers they use at most supermarkets. you know where they outsource the job they used to pay a poor person to do; now they get the customer to negotiate with the robot instead, at no added cost. they ask you to pay for shopping bags these days though, like you can still get the shit ones for free but if you want the good ones they want you to shell out cash. this is because they hate the customer.
-the autolooms im proposing, which would put all those third-world seamstressess in sweatshops in china and bangaladesh out of jobs.
-nobody has to pay for art anymore, you can get a cheap-as-free guy on deviantart to do it, or you can just steal, or you can design a robot that creates infinite arts. like:
http://strangethink.itch.io/secret-habitati actually like these new technologies, they're cool, but we could use them to do good or to do evil, and evil is more sound, economically speaking. this is the economics that starves people (of money, thus of food, thus killing them) and it's the economics that we cannot opt out of. if one company doesnt go for it, the other company will. so we need to plan ahead unless we want a huge human extinction, and soon. i might seem like an end-is-nigh duder but all of this is rich subject matter for scifi and fantasy and if i recall correctly everybody is still super enamored of these kinds of stories in games. so its good to discuss it i think.
something i keep saying about information technology and computer science is that we're collapsing two different-but-related fields when we talk about it this way: information science (the new software ideas, which is slow, increases linearly) and computer technology (the new hardware ideas, which is fast and increases exponentially).
if we take this as true, we can see that all of us idea people are gonna be outperformed by robots. we could pay a smart guy to solve a new problem once, or we could get a robot in, removing the problem forever, and never pay anyone except for maybe the guy who fixes the robot (who could also be replaced with a robot). the only reason any job in IT exists (system architect and system admin for example) is because we decided it would be important to have this incredibly arcane field that noone understands and then pay a guy to understand it and design solutions as needed. system architect, get that guy in when you buy a heap of new tech, to hook it up properly, then system admin, he's a shittier version of the same guy you can keep on staff because you need a guy to fix it when it goes down and it'd be expensive to get the architect in all the time, the admin works for less money. we could replace both of these guys with robots though.
what does that have to do with y2k? y2k is a bunch of fear-mongering bullshit made up to create IT jobs. but if it had been real, where would we be now? what kind of post apocalypse would we live in where we let the robots destroy us all so easily?
and what does that have to do with lou bega? well lou bega is sort of a prophet for an old way of thinking, where
-girls are a dime a dozen
-girls are products
-girls are easily manipulated
-it is fun and heroic to think these things
and none of these things are true in our 2015, we should not even wish for them to be true, probably. and they would not be true in the wasteland of a 2015 decimated by robots 15 years earlier. where would you even find a girl? so it's kinda poetic even though it be eurotrash pop. lots of people bought it. but the culture went a different way. but those people are still around. and you still hear these dumb songs playing in the supermarket. the supermarket is another dumb idea that we cling to, even though it no longer serves us.
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