Cyber Monday:
Promoted by retailers as a day for online shopping bargains, like R2D2 Measuring cups and ProTech Toolkits.
Promoted by Footprint to Wings as a day to contemplate our robot teammates, and electronic sustainability.
Our Robot Teammates
Humans are awesome. We make machines to make our lives easier. And Machines are awesome. At doing so many jobs. Including ours! You would think we’d be happy about this, punching out early and designing the lifestyles we’ve always wanted. But it turns out we’ve bundled income with jobs and can’t imagine one without the other.
This turns our techno-windfall into a big problem.
The situation is not inherently difficult. Humans could embrace the rise of our robot jobjackers and focus on how to distribute the bounty, aka “Automation Dividend” (#Tax the Robots | #BasicIncome).
Of course, this might involve negotiating with robots (and their human overlords), and challenging some social norms. And who has time for such nonsense? We’re in the middle of a “job crisis.” We need “job creators” to manufacture jobs, politicians to throw out immigrants who are “stealing jobs” and so on.
What does this Robot-Jobs thing have to do with the Race to Zero Carbon?
A lot. The rules of the race are, “The first state to achieve a net zero carbon economy with the best quality of life, wins!”
How we choose to integrate our robot teammates into our economy has a big impact on everyone’s quality of life. Likewise how we choose to think about jobs.
More about that in upcoming posts. In the meantime, check out some of our favorite “job conundrum” coaches:
Go jobjacking robots!
Electronic Sustainability
Speaking of the cyber, what happens to electronic waste? Some is responsibly recycled, and some is not. We have a ways to go to achieve a circular electronics economy.
For now, you can help reduce the flow of things into the electronic waste stream by taking the #RepairPledge. Feel free to take advantage of the LAST DAY for deals from iFixit to help make those aforementioned repairs. Yay Cyber Monday!
Check back in again tomorrow for the #GivingWingsDay Challenges. Fasten your seat belts!
To zero carbon and beyond,
Rezwan
