23/05/2026
RISE OF MACHINES
I once spoke at an event, a graduation ceremony for top achievers of a reputable institution.
Highlights
why Retirement was capped at age 65?
AGRARIAN AGES
During thee agrarian age, the jobs required physical strength. You needed your body most to bend on the farm 🚜, to carry loads, to clean, to drive a horse cart, to harvest cotton, to make shoes out your skin leather etc.
INDINDUSTRIAL AGE (Introduction of machines)
industrial machines started taking some of the work from the people. Driving a car needed less physical strength than driving a horse 🐎.
Tilling the ground with tractor was less physically demanding than using a cow 🐄 or a hoe.
Sewing clothes with needle and threat was replaced by a knitting machine. etc
Jobs which needed physical strength became redundant. Skills jobs went into demand. If you had a skill to operate a machine you were interested in. We moved from physical strength 💪 to mental strength.
If you could use a typewriter, you were preferred in journalism.
Effect on Retirement age: Dropped to about 55 years.
You were now allowed out of system 10 earlier.
4th Industrial Age (Rise of Machines)
The (www) world wide web age. We now experiencing people out of work as early as out of graduation. Early 20s. Artificial intelligence (AI) is doing almost all the jobs that a human being can do. Making it difficult too compete at both physical and mental level.
People needed now are super mentally strong people.
However I see lot of people, even the youth toy-toying to the government on high levels of unemployment.
If an institution can manage 10 tractors to till land of 100 hectares in a day to meet their food security production plans or maanage 10 000 people to do the work with hoes in a month, which option do we reasonably and realistically believe the institution will opt for?
I'll leave it there. The answer will wake you up to the reality of the machines.
