You might be familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s theory of “The Singularity” — the idea that mankind’s progress will become faster and faster in such a way that any predictable sense of progress will be lost. One day we’ll cure cancer, the next we’ll be sucking power out of the sun, three minutes later we’ll have evolved to leave our corporal bodies behind and exist as multidimensional Spirit creatures.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what this ever increasing level progress and change could do to people’s careers. If you went back back 100 years and took up a career as a horse shoe maker, you’d have a pretty stable occupation. At some point, you’d see cars coming, but you have 10, 20 years before your service was really made obsolete. In the near future, I don’t think you’ll have that forewarning. You could be a computer programmer and master the object-oriented programming language Z+, and overnight find the language made obsolete. You could be a recording engineer and master the techniques for the current music fad, electro-reggae-rap, only to find the fad disappear within the space of a few months. The massive onslaught and distribution of information and media could lead to people getting bored of said information and media much faster, leaving producers of such information and media out of work.

“Straw Dogs” gets into this.

One of the pioneers of robotics is written: ‘In the next century inexpensive but capable robots will displace human labor so broadly that the average workday would have to plummet to practically zero to keep everyone employed.’

Hans Moravec’s vision of the future may be closer than we think. New technologies are rapidly displacing human labor. The ‘underclass’ of permanently unemployed is partly the result of poor education and misguided economic policies. Yet it is time that increasing numbers are becoming economically redundant. It is no longer unthinkable that within a few generations the majority of the population will have little or no role in the production process.

So, the theory here is that the production of useful “stuff” — be it food, products and (in my view at least) intangibles like music, fiction etc. will be done by robots and computers. Does that mean people do nothing? “Straw Dogs” continues…

An economy whose core tasks are done by machines will value human labor only insofar as it cannot be replaced. Moravec writes: ‘Many trends in industrialized societies lead to a future were humans are supported by machines, as our ancestors were by wildlife.’ That, according to Jeremy Rifkin, does not mean mass unemployment. Rather we are approaching a time when, in Moravec’s words, ‘ almost all humans work to amuse other humans’.

You better start working on getting motherfucking amusing!