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Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2024

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Robots and Evolution

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Throughout history innovations have been resisted.
There is the possibly apocryphal story that one of the Egyptian pharaohs issued an edict banning steam powered chariots because the noise frightened the horses.
In verifiable history, in the late 1700s a Frenchman named Jacquard invented an automatic loom. Amazingly for its time, it used punchcards to control the mechanism. The automatic loom quickly supplanted weavers, because it could produce fabric far faster and cheaper. The weavers’ guilds objected. Many of the weavers broke into automated factories and threw their wooden shoes into the looms to shut them down. Those wooden shoes were called sabot, thus we get the word sabotage.

In the early 1900s there was resistance to automobiles, largely by carriage makers, buggy whip makers, draft horse breeders, etc. In England, under pressure from these groups, Parliament passed a law saying that any motorcar must be preceded on the road by a man waving a red flag. That law persisted until 1918, when it was finally realized how impractical it was.
In my own case, I was in the magazine business from the early 1980s. I watched the transitions as new technologies made former jobs redundant. Initially I wrote my articles on a typewriter and mailed them in to the magazine, where a typesetter retyped them on a device that wrote them onto the offset plates used to print the magazine. Photos to accompany my articles had to be made on film and the film had to be developed and printed, a laborious process.

I got my first computer in 1986. It was a Heathkit/Zenith that arrived in kit form. I was happily surprised when it worked after I assembled it. It had no hard drive, just ran on the old big floppy disks. The monitor had a black screen on which orange letters appeared as I typed. I wrote my first book on that computer. It worked for text, but could not handle images. My printer was a Kyocera dot matrix device that used long rolls of paper. I mailed my finished articles on floppy disks along with a hard copy and my photographs. Later, I upgraded to a Windows computer and bought a Nikon scanner to scan negatives and color slides. But I still sent my images in on physical media, floppies at first, later CDs.

I won’t go into more detail about the transition. I’ll only say that our typesetters lost their jobs, along with the repro camera operators, but new jobs were created operating the Mac computers used to lay out the magazines. Staff numbers went down, but only slightly, and the new jobs paid well. Of course, printed magazines have pretty much vanished today, gone on the Internet or out of business entirely. Since I don’t have Internet access, my choices of magazines has been severely limited, and those print magazines that survive are mostly priced out of my range. I subscribed to Rolling Stone since the 1960s, but when it jumped to sixty dollars a year I had to drop it. I used to get Professional Photographer, but that’s now only available to Professional Photographers of America members. I used to be a member, even wrote for the magazine, but membership would be useless to me now. I haven’t had a camera in my hands for seventeen years. I was reminded of these transitions by the dockworkers’ strike. One of their demands is protection from automation. They’re just like the weavers. Resisting the advance of technology is futile, it can’t be stopped. Rather than try to stop it we must adapt to it.

In the late 1990s, I’ve forgotten the exact year, on one of my trips to Japan, I toured a fully automated Canon camera factory. It was the size of a football field, but in the entire factory that churned out hundreds of cameras an hour there were only four humans. Dressed in white jumpsuits, they walked around with clipboards writing down readings from gauges.
Robot forklifts ran around the floors following yellow stripes on the floor picking up pallets of parts and carrying them to the big machines assembling the parts into cameras. The factory operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Robots don’t need coffee breaks, food, sleep, medical insurance, etc. That is the future. Human manual labor is disappearing, and the speed is advancing. Rather than trying to stop or slow it down, we humans must learn the present jobs automation cannot do or new jobs that technology is creating.

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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models.  He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.

On September 16, 2024  Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.

To read additional articles by Bob Shell link here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-ufo-nonsense/