Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of old science fiction novels. You know the really ancient stuff from hundreds of years ago? It can be difficult at times, challenging, the language is so old fashioned and dated.
But I do enjoy the concepts, the way people from the twentieth and twenty first centuries thought things would go. Some of them were amazingly accurate with their predictions. Humans living or the Moon and Mars, our life span getting increasingly longer, artificial intelligence.
Yet the one thing they got consistently wrong was how we would interact with technology. Robots serving food, robots cleaning floors, robots doing construction, mining on Mercury.
That last one really make me laugh. If my company loses a single robot it is a tragedy. Losing half a dozen would be enough to causes shares to plummet and cost several people their jobs. They are and always will be way too expensive and difficult to manufacture to use foolishly.
People on the other hand cost nothing. Losing one, or a dozen, or a thousand in a mining accident, as happens frequently, is of no great concern.
It’s not as if they are difficult to replace.