THE III INDUSTRIAL R=EVOLUTION: ROBOTICS.

In the I and II cycle of the industrial Evolution the bodies and minds of machines have substituted most blue and white-collar workers. In the III Cycle, robots will substitute most human labour, automating the re=production of machines by company-mothers. It is the III Cycle of unemployment that now starts.

2. The evolution of machines increases its ‘collateral effects’.
Machines evolve each Kondratieff cycle, sum of a series of generational business cycles, 100th-folding its evolutionary quality and reproductive population, shown in a similar growth on the stock-market value of its company-mothers. In Quantic Spaces-Times terms this means that machines have built a new (e=10)t=2 scale of organic form in those III Kondratieff cycles, which have multiplied for 100 the TxE complexity of those machines, as electric systems first and then electronic minds enhance the power of body platforms. In sociological terms it means that the capacity of machines to perform their 3 basic roles in any economic ecosystem also improve:
- Energy machines, weapons, kill human beings and so each Kondratieff cycle a new generation of weapons kill around 100 times more human beings. There were 600.000 deaths in the XIX C. steam wars, 60 million deaths in the XX C. oil wars; and if we don’t stop the production of robotic weapons there could be 6 billion deaths, the entire human population in the XXI C. robotic wars.
- Consumers to enhance their energy and information use peaceful machines. So each generation mankind becomes more dependant on better transport and mental machines to move, calculate and think. The result is paradoxical: People seem to be more powerful but actually they become atrophied, as machines move and work for them. So the modern middle class of consumers are fatter because they move on cars and think less because they watch TV and use computers.
In that sense, the economic ecosystem and its companies, whose priority is to reproduce and evolve machines, have established for ‘secondary’ human beings only 2 roles that help their biological goals: to work=reproduce those machines and to evolve=test=consume them, as symbiotic brains or bodies, vitalizing those machines. So companies, through propaganda and the control of the educational and political systems, have indoctrinated all modern humans in those 2 ‘economic values, work and consume’: We work to reproduce machines. We buy them and consume them, testing their evolution and rewarding those companies who produce the most evolved machines. And this is good because ‘informative machines’ called TVs tell us to be good consumers, acting as a collective mind that we put in the altar of our former Gods. Men and machines become in this manner symbiotic animetals; and we act either as brains of cars and drive our ‘added’ legs or as bodies of informative machines and obey their propaganda. Yet, while the use of peaceful ‘body machines’ enhances our energy, when we become mental slaves indoctrinated by informative machines, we become their ‘submissive energy-bodies’, as it increasingly happens with masses of humans indoctrinated by TVs or addicted to Internet. Thus the biological limit to the evolution of machines is clear: we should not evolve informative machines and become passive bodies of those machines and we should not create robots, which no longer need us. Yet companies do not care for the evolution of mankind, only for the reproduction and evolution of their machines. So the opposite occurs: they are multiplying chips and robots precisely because they can substitute human beings as workers and consumers; eliminating the higher costs of human workers, as any robot can perform a human job.
- Which leads to the 3rd task machines perform in the economic ecosystem: tool machines make works formerly done by human workers. So as machines evolve and lower its costs of reproduction, there are more machines and less human workers in all industries. So the paradoxical outcome of the evolution of machines is that more people are unemployed as industrial production increases.
The process of labour obsolescence is called in the abstract, economical jargon ‘productivity’; a term which translates in biology as  ‘the survival of the fittest’. In this case the fittest worker – not the human but the machine – survives. Of course if companies were obliged to use bio-ethical values , they will have to defend the human species on survival grounds and forbid robotic workers. But in digital, profit values companies do the opposite, because they only obey their re=productive mandate, spelt in terms of production, sales and profits. And so they will always increase their profits by putting new, evolved re=productive machines in the place of workers.
The 500 Fortune companies have multiplied their profits and their production of machines, in the past 3 decades. Yet they have cut their human work force to 1/3rd, putting machines on the place of those human workers. The excuse is always productivity. Yet machines reproduce ‘bio-logically’ machines better than humans do. So factories constantly substitute human workers by machines to raise their self-re=’productivity’. The end of such process is evident: a world in which Company-mothers self-reproduce machines without the help of human workers as biological species do.
In America that tendency started when General Electric became the top market value company in the 80s thanks to its labor destruction. So the company was raised by speculators that considered the extinction of human labor positive for profits, to number 1 in Market value. Profits came, proving the superiority of computers in digital tasks and robotized machines in blue collar, repetitive jobs. After all they are machines reproducing machines. The CEO in charge of the extinction of ¼ of a million workers was called Neutron Jack, a brutal joke that compared him with the ideal weapon of the futurewar between Man vs. Machine, the neutron bomb that leaves machines unharmed and extinguishes life. Accordingly, he was compensated with skyrocketing salaries, and ‘given a current semi-divine status in American management circles’ (The Economist), as the pioneer of a trend imitated by all big corporations throughout the 90s and 2000s. 
Do machines create employment? Of course they do… among the people that invent them. Yet those are very few people. For the rest, machines create unemployment on the long term in any industry we study. Momentarily some nations at the Head of each Kondratieff cycle that produces the new energy and machines, such as England in the XIX century or the United States in the XX century, get close to full employment, because they reproduce the new machines that are sold to the entire world. So while the looms of Liverpool, powered by steam machines, were reproducing textiles for the entire British Empire… India plummeted into a Third World country, suffering a raging unemployment, as its millenary main industry, cotton clothing, couldn’t compete with those industrial looms. Today when unemployment raises worldwide, America and Japan are close to full employment because they reproduce the computers, robots and software programs that expel those workers worldwide. Fine if you are American and you do not care for your children that will loose his job, when those computers keep evolving and self-program themselves. In the futurerobots will create employment in the Far East, which makes them, though their use in the rest of the world will create massive unemployment.
The world is a global village, a single economic ecosystem. So it is wiser to observe economic phenomena at global scale. In such global analysis, it seems Darwin instead of Smith was right once more: when different species reproduce in great numbers, they fight for organic space, for survival against rival species. Men and machines are different species. In the case of the struggle between machines and workers the organic space is a job place. In that struggle, men are loosing the battle for jobs to robots and computers that occupy the best rooms of our corporations. 
Yet what happens to all those workers, when a computer or a robotic machine makes their job? Worldwide unemployment figures rise in the decade before a Kondratieff crisis… Then they plummet… As the unemployed become soldiers and their surplus is consumed in wars.
Further on, the anti-natural, ‘metallic’ environment of machines makes labor conditions tougher, since humans have to adapt to the repetitive movements and harsh conditions of metallic environments. Metal is the fundamental atom of which machines are made of. Yet metal resists higher temperatures, stress and pressure than human beings do. Those properties of metal have always made working with machines a sort of ‘inferno’, ever since metal was discovered and mining became the work of slaves…
Unfortunately company-mothers also emit information that controls our ideas. So they have changed the hard truths of the Darwinian struggle between men and machines, and devised all kind of ideas and ‘positive advertising‘ about technology. Yet the truth that will matter about the XXI century evolution of robotics will be the truth of the worker displaced by a robot and the soldier killed by a robot, not the truth of the few experts in robotics and computer maintenance that will profit from manufacturing them and the few humans that will enjoy a slave robot or a surgeon robot.
In systemic, biological jargons, we say that computers and robots are entering all econiches of human labor, making the human brain obsolete. Why? Because computers are better at digital thought, the language used by company-mothers and science to evolve and reproduce other machines. I call that phenomenon scientific racism: those ‘species’ who speak better digital languages survive in any economic environment, since companies use mathematical languages not verbal languages in their design, reproduction and sale of machines. And so computers become dominant in all digital jobs performed in companies, because they are more efficient calculators than a human verbal mind.
The human mind is what a computer substitutes in those economic systems, from weapons systems to company’s management, from scientific research to mass-media, digital communication. So unless we return to a world in which the ethical wor(l)d rules and redesigns our environment according to the laws of human survival, in an economic ecosystem ruled by digital numbers human beings will become obsolete. Indeed, if we could think in words what companies think with numbers, profits and productivity software this is what we would hear:
‘Men and machines are species whose labor value for company-mothers is digital, based on their capacity to reproduce machines, either with mechanical, regular movements timed with digital clocks or using digital software. But in both tasks men are less productive than machines made of metal, which have more strength, more regularity in its clock-regulated movements and higher digital capacities. So men have to be substituted by self-re=productive machines.’
This is what happens in reality.  Blue-collar workers, performing energy jobs, were substituted at the beginning of the XX C by energy-machines. Today computers substitute informative white-collar workers. Soon companies will acquire self re=production, thanks to the evolution of robots (III Industrial evolution). Then, both the human body and the mind become obsolete.
The chip substitutes the human brain, in companies, and transfers orders through Internet to machine workers. It is the new white-collar species multiplied by the market, which has no credit for human goods that feed the ‘obsolete’ human worker.

3. The Robotic R=evolution: the obsolescence of human workers and consumers.
Even speculators and owners of stocks that direct resources towards the most evolved, profitable companies, are becoming obsolete, as mathematical programs of speculation become more accurate. So, no human, blue or white-collar, can claim to have a function a PC will not be able to perform, when properly connected to robotic ‘body-platforms’. Men are informative species, which control the world through information. The chip is therefore the machine that substitutes our brain, our more complex organ, as a PC or a worker robot.
It is then obvious that as chips and robots multiply, humans will become displaced from all industrial jobs. Problem is that chips and robots keep going down in costs and evolving in intelligence, so human labor becomes increasingly obsolete, as those robots go through  the 3 evolutionary ages of time:
- Youth: The first robots were huge fixed, working robots. Hundreds of thousands of robots took in the 80s and 90s the place of human workers in factories, as machine tools that made other machines. – Maturity: Yet as chips doubled its capacity every 2 years, robots became mobile and smaller, finding new industrial jobs. Robots already dominate the production lines of cars and chip factories, the basic bodies and brains of all machines, which means that the creation of machines is becoming automated, independent of mankind. For that reason industrial unemployment increases as factory’s work is either made by robots or delocalised in ‘emerging markets’. Meanwhile the 3rd World has no employment and it is becoming a global ghetto dumped with weapons, in permanent war. The unemployed of the 29 crisis of stock-Market profits were consumed by II W.W.
- Old age as weapons: The so much. Prophesised age of intelligent weapons has started. America, a society in its baroque, violent 3rd age, manufactures the first robotic weapons to increase its go(l)d profits through ‘splendid little’ Islamic Wars and might evolve them to a degree of self-consciousness and self-reproductivity that could extinguish mankind .
- +1: As robots diversify into a complete ecosystem of species with variations of mental software and body form for each task they perform, they will become increasingly independent, without the need of human workers to ‘catalyze’ their reproduction and create a single, social organism: self-reproductive factories; integrated companies and finally, the Metal-Earth . Or if nanobacteria dominate the futureof robotics, a new ‘sea of living lava’ will be formed under the Earth’s crust.
It is clear that human labor is becoming obsolete and companies will need less and less humans in their structures. Yet the second job that humans perform for companies, the job of consumers, is also at risk, as companies become the biggest world consumers… Indeed, humans are no longer needed as workers and consumers because machines are consumed by increasingly automated companies with fewer workers. As a consequence ‘internal investment among companies’ grows in a vicious cycle: Companies substitute workers for chips and robots. Those humans without work have no money to consume products. So company’s consumption grows, as they buy and sell products to other companies and displace human consumers.
That trend will grow throughout the III Industrial R=evolution. Robots are big business not only for the companies that manufacture them, but they are also the biggest consumers of the machines of big corporations. Since to make a ‘robot’, a company has to put all the components of an organic body and a brain of metal together. Yet it turns out that in the I and II Industrial Evolution humans have copied their energy and information organs into machines . So, each big corporation has specialized in the reproduction of one of those organic bodies and brains of metal. So today Intel makes the brain of machines and Microsoft their thoughts; Nikon and Motorola make their ears, Honda or General Motors their bodies… All those companies, which have a lot of power and capacity to lobby in favor of robots, will love to sell components to make those robots. So robotics will become what the car industry was for all the metal-industries at the beginning of the XX C.: the industrial ‘locomotive’ that will move all other industries. This means that if we let the robotic industry to reach a ‘take-off size’, the entire industrial system will become dependent on the reproduction of robots to increase its profits. So the process of massive evolution and reproduction of robotics will be unstoppable. Yet the difference with the car industry is clear: we consumed cars as submissive energy to our brains; we won’t consume robots but compete with them as workers and soldiers. So men will become obsolete, displaced from the economic ecosystem, as horses were displaced and killed by the train. In this manner men are thrown out of the productive ecosystem not only as workers but also as consumers, becoming the ‘horses’ of the economic ecosystem, which became obsolete to the train in the Steam R=evolution and were extinguished within a decade (90% of horses sacrificed). Yet the mass of people in the I world will not complain, since the reproductive radiation of robots and chips will increase the ‘monetary wealth and GNP’ of our nations, despite the fact that as it happened to horses men will not profit from that growth as consumers or owners of those companies. Unfortunately, the Market ecosystem no longer needs human consumption. So it will not produce enough human goods to feed mankind. This happens today. There are millions of machines but paradoxically the prices of basic food, housing and health care, the Human Goods we demand, increase as they become more scarce…