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The Case for Robots & Retirement




The future of work is Robots.

The future of Humanity is Retirement.


These aren't terribly controversial ideas these days. But they are still 2 entirely separate efforts which still need to be brought together into a cohesive plan to move humanity forward, and get us to a "Well-Being Age".


In many areas, we are currently too wrapped up in unrealistic 'what about-isms' to make progress.


If we did outline a plan for how we could make this leap, it would look like this:


Before getting started, it's important to reflect on a few core principles.

This may seem a little strange and out of the ordinary at first, but we already do a lot of this without even thinking about it. We're just being more deliberate, so as to avoid the pitfalls of wasting time 'correcting' wrong answers, infinitely.


An example will help:

What's 2 + 2 = ?


And:

How many possible answers could someone give?


Now, being smart, reasonable, and educated people, we tend to think there's only 1 answer, and that answer is 4.


However, that's not the question.


The question is:

How many possible answers could someone give?


Well, let's start listing all the possible 'bad' answers that someone COULD give to the question 2 + 2 = ?

  • 5

  • 2

  • 8

  • Elephant

  • Banana

  • Pluto

  • The circumference of a circle

  • The Complete Works of Shakespeare....

And on and on and on... to infinity.


So, there are an infinite number of wrong / bad answers to every question.


If our goal is understanding and making progress on the good answers, we cannot spend time correcting all the bad ones. Or that will consume all of our time.



Next....

We are currently in an age where 'work' and 'money' play important roles in our lives. Because they allow us to then lives the lives we actually want to live.


But, we often don't see them for what they are: simply means to an end.


And, as we better understand the end we want, we can reduce the work and money required to achieve it. Not only for ourselves, but as a society / species.


 

So, what is the case for Robots & Retirements?


Why Robots?


Almost everything we have words for are 'technology':

  • House

  • Clothes

  • Road

  • Eye Glasses

  • Book

  • Spear

  • Scissors

  • Pen

  • Guitar


All technology is invented to do some kind of work:

  • Houses exist to protect us from nature

  • Clothes exist to protect us from nature

  • Roads exist to make transportation easier

  • Eye Glasses exist to help us see

  • Books exist to store and transport information


And the evolution of society directly correlates with the available technology.


We are simply in a phase of human development where the available technology can now do any work for a lower COST, both in time, materials, and money (at scale).


And, more importantly, when it comes to the things we are actually trying to achieve, the lives we actually want to live represented by a "high degree of well-being", over a LONG period of time, that would look like this:

We are already in the Robots & Retirement period, with steeply declining costs, and increasing well-being.


However, our current systems are not designed to account for this, and are stuck measuring work hours and money .... disconnected from the purpose / reason behind them... our well-being.


In 2016, the Founder of the World Economic Forum described it like this:

The 4th Industrial Revolution simply referring to the connected / smart technologies of today.



The same year, McKinsey came out with the following prediction of work automation over the next 80 years:

The ORANGE portion refers to the speed of technological development, and the percentage of ALL work that the technology would be able to automate at a lower cost.


Worth noting: in 2016, that number was already at 50%.


So, in 2016, we already had the technology to automate 50% of the global workforce.


The BLUE portion refers to the speed of implementation and adoption of those technologies, which is much slower.


Based on this:

By 2038, within just 1 generation, we will have the technology to automate 95% of human labor.


It'll take another generation to adopt it.


But this trend is happening, and accelerating. And we aren't prepared.


 

So how do we prepare?


We get everyone ready to retire. Permanently.

There are 2 parts to the problem:

  1. Getting the technological foundation in place to support 100% of humanity retiring

  2. Getting programs built to help people retire and live out the rest of their lives happily, healthfully, and meaningfully.

The first part is completed through the "Robots" effort.


The second part is modeled after:

  1. How evolution, physics, and biology work

  2. Familiar models of retirement living that we are already familiar with, like: retirement, childhood, weekends, vacations, entertainment.

The details of how that works, and how we build it into a new "Well-being Age" is a longer conversation, but it is essentially taking the good work we've already done, understanding it better, and scaling it to 100% of the population 100% of the time.



 

Now, why would anyone ever want to do this?


Well, turns out, we already do. And have for some time.

The only difference now is that, we can.


So, why don't we?


And why don't you join us?



 

Attached is a PDF version, with some extra content.


I'll post a video walking through it at some point, and add here as well.


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