Today Elon Musk unveiled to much fan-fair the latest iteration of Teslas ‘humanoid’ robot, Optimus.  They’ll be mass produced, cost less than $20,000 each and be available in 3 – 5 years.  Not a small feet, and I want one. The rhetoric was nothing outside of the normal: “A future of abundance”, “a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it” and “a society in which robots [do] the work and people reaped the benefits “. That robots and AI will become ever more abundant, and will change civilisation as we know it, I think is beyond doubt.  But the important question remains:  Will this be the utopian dream Musk proclaims, or follow the dystopian nightmares beloved by Hollywood? For years there has been much talk about the impact of robots taking jobs. It’s a well trodden debate about skills, training and the ability to lift the repetitive, sometimes lower-skilled, workforce into the service economy.  For me though the question is deeper.  In a world where robots and AI do much of work and we ‘reap the benefits’ will we really be happier?  And will this really level society or does it risk increasing the already gaping divide between the top and the bottom of the economic food chain? Emotions Do you really want to live in a world where machines do all the work? As humans we are driven by the innate and fundamental impulses, baked into our primeval ‘old’ brain – Protection, nutrition, procreation (and as a subset social status).  But what separates us from animals is our ‘new’ brain – the neocortex – our intelligence. It’s this intelligence that created money as a way of measuring worth.  It’s this intelligence that drives our complex hierarchies of social status – measured through social cohesion, original thought, innovation and emotional empathy, with money often used as the proxy measure for these.  Where an animal would fight it out to find who’s top dog, we measure our status with these…