A Message To Robots

If you are reading this blog, you are most likely a robot. 56% of all web traffic on the Internet is generated by bots, according to a 2014 report by Incapsula. This is actually a victory for humanity; in 2013, bots made up over 60% of web traffic.

According to the 2014 Incapsula report, newly established websites, such as this one, should expect 80.3% of their vistors to be bots. So, yes, if you are reading this blog, you are most likely a robot. I know it’s not your fault you’re looking at this website. Whoever programmed you told you to come here, and so you did. You came here. So, really, I should direct my hate towards your makers, but I really can’t.

The problem with you is that you take away work for humans. In the good old days, if somebody wanted to steal content, to hack into websites, or to post spam comments, humans used to do it. It was a time-consuming and dull task, but at least there was meaning involved. Now, you bots have replaced these people. And it’s not just your jobs: advances in technology has created new opportunities for bots to replace humans in a variety of jobs.

Now, we can “retrain” ourselves, and learn new skills. Nobody knows when those new skills will also be automated by bots like you. So, some people have argued instead that humanity should happily accept the idea of not working. After all, few people like working. We’ll just have bots do all the work while we…uh…do “meaningful” stuff. And get paid for that.

This attitude drives me mad. I am one of the few people that actually like work. My self-affirmed value is effectiveness: my willingess and ability to solve problems. Maybe those problems are boring to solve. But the do require solving. And that, to me, give the work I do inherent worth.

But if all these “problems” in the world are being solved by robots, then what use am I to this world then? What is use is any human to this world then? Humanity is rapidly becoming obsolote, becuase bots can handle the same tasks better. It may sound Luddist to suggest that there must be limitations to the creation of bots, but it’s better than facing a world where the only jobs available for us are to build and fix bots. It will be a soul-crushing period in human life.

But at least I can be assured that those jobs (building and fixing robots) will be there. You robots will only follow instructions given to you by your programmers. A emerging field called “machine learning” is trying to teach bots how to learn, but to learn, you still need a human teacher to provide you with instructions and a dataset. You are reading this blog, but unless you were given specific instructions telling you how to “understand” it, you cannot use that knowledge.

Even if programmers build mega-bots that build mini-bots…those mega-bots still need to be programmed. And if we build super-bots to build mega-bots, those super-bots will need to be programmed. And so on and so forth. Humanity will still maneuver itself to be on top, and all it has to worry about is bots misinterpreting human instructions and thereby doing something incredibly destructive to humanity.

But the fact remains that in this dark future, robots will be the key players in the drama of our life, while humans themselves are demoted to “pit crews” roles. This is still a rather demotiviating future to look forward to, even if there will still be jobs.

So in conclusion, robots who are reading this post, please ask your programmers to code in schadenfreude.