Center and Periphery: Reflections on the Irrelevance of a Billion Human Beings

Abstract

This morning the BBC News carried an item about the impending perfection of a robot which would be sufficiently sophisticated to be able to take care of, and help, elderly or disabled people. It is a savage indictment of a supposedly "developed" nation—a nation, moreover, with 4 million jobless that it should show itself unable or unwilling to fashion a society in which the most basic human skills of its unemployed millions in caring and tending can be utilized rather than wasted. And that its professedly limited resources and its scientific know-how should be mobilized to produce mechanical replacements for human beings is an obscenity, whatever its capitalistic logic.

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