Automation is the greatest tool we humans can use to escape our oppressive corporate overlords. I continually strive for the day that a never tiring machine (or automata) can take over parts of my daily tasks.

I understand that there is great fear attached to automation. Just imagine the amount of humans that’s going to get laid off because of the more efficient, never tiring, non complaining machines that will replace them. This would most definitely bring about the collapse of our current economic system. I wonder if everyone sees it the same way. I would like to propose that this mass extinction of non-automated labor would not cause a major catastrophe, but rather a new renaissance for us humans.

I would like to call this new era of efficiency as the Automation Age (I’m sure someone has already coined this, dammit). This would be the age that would free us humans from having to go and perform our repetitive tasks. All that boring stuff would be delegated to machines (or again, automata, I write software so the closest thing to manual labor for me is physically standing up and walking to a meeting). This would only leave us with tasks that require creativity and humane decision making (until even that gets automated, this is where we get enslaved by the machines).

I picture a future where I would be doing pair programming with Martin Fowler while we have Kent Beck writing unit tests for us. Of course they would just be virtual, artificial intelligence versions of the real person in their prime.

This may all sound looney, but I have a feeling this is going to happen within our generation. Looking forward to buying stocks from Skynet.