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Lowell Ponte, Redefining Humankind, www.AmericanThinker.com, Longer Article, Cybernetic Prison of Social Infantilized Humans, Robot Rights, Human Sweat on Brow from Fear Not Labor, Government Jobs and Minimum Wage Citizens of Cyberborg Nanny State, Dr Bill Deagle MD AAEM ACAM A4M, NutriMedical Report, www.Deagle-Network.com, www.ClayandIRON.com, www.NutriMedical.com, 

Redefining Humankind

By Lowell Ponte

As God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, He told Adam that henceforth “through painful toil….[and] the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”

Socialists and scientists now declare that a new Eden, a Heaven on Earth, is arriving. All of us can soon live sweat-free on easy low-hanging fruit from the welfare-state tree in the center of the government’s garden.

Vermont’s self-described socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders would guarantee a government job paying at least $12-15 an hour plus health benefits to anyone in America who “needs or wants one.”

This would do more than cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually. It would devastate consumers by prompting millions of minimum wage employees to quit to “work” instead for the government, which might send the cost of hamburgers and thousands of other items skyrocketing.

Minimum wage employers would be forced to automate, further shrinking the private sector and the traditional ladder to work and achievement. Even more will become dependent on government make-work jobs. And they will vote for the political party of ever-expanding government.

In Europe, 156 experts in robotics and Artificial Intelligence have just written an open letter to the European Union arguing against EU plans to redefine robots as “electronic persons.”

Their immediate objection, say these experts, is the EU effort to hold robots individually responsible for any harm they do. This would require a costly individual insurance policy for each robot employed, which would greatly increase the cost of replacing human workers with robots. This will slow down robot development.

Unmentioned, as both sides know, is what giving robots the status of “electronic persons” implies. This could give robots a theoretical array of heretofore-human rights. Only days ago, a Japanese robot won 4,000 human votes in the race for mayor in a Tokyo suburb.

The real aim of the European Union, as Craig R. Smith and I explained in our book Money, Morality & The Machine, is to declare robots persons so that they may be individually taxed. This will make it more costly for companies to replace humans; but robots still have the advantages of never getting sick, needing sleep or vacations, going on strike, or loafing.

If robots can do the work by the sweat of their brow, and if something like welfare is available, then, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi says, humans have the ease and leisure to play, to “become artists,” in the new statist Garden of Eden.

By taxing robots, socialists believe, government would acquire the means to give a free ride to humans displaced in their jobs by robots. We can either enjoy Senator Sanders’ no-show easy job pay, or we can get the Progressive dream of a “Guaranteed Basic Income,” money for nothing.

Even some libertarians such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, as Smith and I wrote, recognize that up to 81 cents of every dollar spent to help the poor in government programs never get to the poor. A “Guaranteed Basic Income” could cost much less than welfare by eliminating all the government middlemen who make their fat livings off social programs.

But when everyone is on some form of government handout, who can afford what the robots are manufacturing?  To paraphrase the old 1930s Depression Era song, will taxes on the robots feed us all?

Finland just pulled the plug early on its limited Guaranteed Basic Income experiment after finding that recipients did much less work. An OECD study found that if taken nationwide, this would increase taxes in Finland by 30 percent. Next door in Sweden, the nation’s chief economic forecaster just predicted that the recent flood of welfare-devouring immigrants will soon cause an increase in taxes.

What happens to human beings in such a New Eden? This lifelong “retirement” could turn humans into perpetual government dependents, permanent children who never need – nor are allowed – to grow up, become self-sufficient and mature.

Imagine a future where all people are self-absorbed, infantile Millennials still living at age 35 in their parents’ basement, watching MSNBC, becoming increasingly narrow-minded in their myopic confirmation bias, and throwing fits whenever anyone disagrees with them.

If you wonder what humanity is worth here, consider how Great Britain’s National Health Service snuffed out the life of baby Alfie Evans, whom it would neither help nor free, lest the Italian hospital that offered to treat him make Britain’s NHS look bad.

The robots will have rights in this future, but you will not. Your brow will still sweat, not from work but from fear. This “New Eden” with its socialist and scientific substitutes for God, is not heaven but a serpent-ruled hell.