No it's not April 1st Options

[SirWilliam]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40628037

Now there are good ideas, there are bad ideas , there are silly ideas and there are downright stupid ideas, and this must surely fit very comfortably in the bloody stupid category .
Not so long ago some barmpot thought it a wheeze to bring the Red Kite back. Now the skies are full of them all circling round trying to find a meal. If you are going to encourage a top predator then make sure there is enough for them to eat without putting domestic animals at risk.
The Eurasian Lynx is a pretty big animal to have wondering about at the bottom of your garden, ( adult males can reach 100lb) , and I for one, would not like to confront it without a 12 bore under my arm.

Vaguely recollect someone wanted to introduce the wolf and the bear back into the Highlands a few years back. Thankfully this fell by the way but this proposal is in an English county so we can't even cite the independence excuse.

[SirWilliam]

Maybe we should escalate to the logical conclusion of replacing humans with robots . This would take the frailty of response out of most situations , assuming the software is "foolproof" . A robotic cyclist is unlikely to ride blindside of an HGV but equally would possess sufficient processor memory when driving a car to use a phone , control the kids and paint it's nails at the same time without causing havoc .

Next stop , robotic children...........now that's a thought

[On the edge]

Maybe we should escalate to the logical conclusion of replacing humans with robots . This would take the frailty of response out of most situations , assuming the software is "foolproof" . A robotic cyclist is unlikely to ride blindside of an HGV but equally would possess sufficient processor memory when driving a car to use a phone , control the kids and paint it's nails at the same time without causing havoc .

Next stop , robotic children...........now that's a thought

The Governor of the Bank of England has fairly recently warned that many more jobs than might be imagined will be automated in the next decade or so, leaving us with an interesting conundrum. How will many of us earn a realistic living? It's quite an interesting excercise to properly analyse our own jobs to see that it is possible.

[Turin Machine]

The Governor of the Bank of England has fairly recently warned that many more jobs than might be imagined will be automated in the next decade or so, leaving us with an interesting conundrum. How will many of us earn a realistic living? It's quite an interesting excercise to properly analyse our own jobs to see that it is possible.

Now this really is 'old news', when the car industry started to develop robotics for spot welding and for use in spray processes we were all told it was the end of the world, 'in twenty years the only people working will be the ones pushing buttons' was the universal wail! Unemployment has dropped since then, only the feckless, lazy dinosaur types got left behind. The rest of the world adapted.

[blackdog]

Now this really is 'old news', when the car industry started to develop robotics for spot welding and for use in spray processes we were all told it was the end of the world, 'in twenty years the only people working will be the ones pushing buttons' was the universal wail! Unemployment has dropped since then, only the feckless, lazy dinosaur types got left behind. The rest of the world adapted.

Unemployment has dropped - but I wonder how much of this is down to government employment subsidies (tax credits) which make it easier for people to work part time. The figures are, to some extent, misleading - I wonder what they would look like if they converted the number of jobs to the number of full-time equivalents.