So what happens when robots take all our jobs away?

Seriously. Temporarily put aside any doubt that we (as a society) can design and build robots to perform many of the tasks we consider manual or menial labor. Picking fruits and vegetables, cleaning houses, assembling small (and large) things, lifting heavy things. Weren’t we all promised that in “the future,” robots would make our lives easier? What about the people whose jobs have been made obsolete?

I don’t know if it’s just that I’m in a pessimistic mood about the future lately, but I have a hard time seeing how this technological advancement won’t lead to more inequality and disparity in the world. Life will be good if you’re a robot designer, and there will surely be new jobs for technicians and such, but the whole concept is to take lots of people out of the equation, so there will be millions left without jobs. I can only imagine this gets even uglier in the US if Willard (Mitt) Romney is elected. He’s apparently not feeling very sympathetic these days…

My car got clobbered Wednesday.

I guess I don’t know exactly when it happened, but sometime between 5 pm Tuesday and 5 pm Wednesday, someone hit my car and took out the front left corner. No note. I did what you have to do: called the police to file a report, called my insurance company to file a claim, took the car to the shop to get an estimate, and got a rental. Cost to repair the damage: $1600, deductible $500. Ouch.

But then today, I got a call from the police that the driver called them and reported himself, saying he “didn’t know what to do” after the collision. I guess he tried calling his insurance company to file a claim, and they told him he had to call the cops, who connected his accident to my report.

I do my fair share of complaining about the Seattle Police Department — and to be sure, there’s a lot to complain about — but they did handle this courteously and efficiently, and it wound up saving me a hefty chunk of change.

I’ve had an exceedingly frustrating week trying to submit a grant proposal for an SBIR. I say “trying” not because I had trouble writing the proposal, but because I’ve been fighting a series of technical problems, with sites taken offline randomly, cryptic error messages, and wait times for support reps of over an hour for every call. It’s a mess, and unfortunately, it’ll be a couple days more at least before it’s totally resolved.

In the midst of all of this, I’ve found myself longing for things that I can actually accomplish. The other day, I took Dina’s car to have the emissions inspected, because I knew it was something I could check off my list. Woodworking definitely falls into the category of things I can do, and so I started in on one of the projects I wrote about recently, the benches for Faye and Nick.

Whoever took down the trees in their backyard included the center of the trunk in one of the slabs. The wood is cherry, and because the ends of the log weren’t sealed when it was cut, because of the way it dried, because the center was included, the middle section of the log was a bit rotted out. Happily, it is wide enough that the middle can be removed and the two outside parts glued together to make a bench, but all that depends on sawing. Which is what I did tonight.

It didn’t actually take too long, to make these two rip cuts down the 6 feet of board — maybe 45 minutes or an hour? And it worked, on both levels — I got rid of the rotten part of the log, and I did something today.