As the smoke clears after the fire that engulfed actress/model/eyebrow goals Cara Delevigne’s home last week, some things are apparent:

  1. Her cats are fine
  2. She’s not wrong about ball pits
  3. The robots are coming for your calendars

I’m copping to a pop culture reference to make a point about society, because now that Buzzfeed News has gone the way of the dodo, the pet rock and the Hula Burger, there’s that critical gap between finding out whether you’re the couch in Central Perk or the one by the fountain in Friends and I aim to fill it.

Besides making us all wonder why our eyebrows aren’t earning us enough to build things in our home more closely associated with animatronic rodents and substandard pizzas, this event points out another looming national crisis: staffing fire departments.

Because fire departments, like nearly every other service-related industry, from hotels to coffee shops to the military, are having trouble finding people interested in working at thankless jobs that don’t pay enough for them to thrive anymore.

Kudos to whatever editor signed off on this headline: Lincoln Fire & Rescue recruiting like wildfire amid national shortage

The cost of living hasn’t kept pace with the cost of doing business, and nowhere is that more apparent than in fields like law enforcement, nursing, education, or the military.

Still, people’s homes still catch fire, even homes with a ball pit, in case we needed any more evidence that there’s a cataclysmic wealth gap in this country.

In a time when affordable housing is vanishing faster than profits at a Trump casino, things like ball pits will make me ill, and not for the usual ball pit related reasons.

So to protect ball pits and other more critical infrastructure, fire departments are turning to options that could mean your next fireman’s calendar will be more bolts than beefcake.

Like any new technology, adoption will take time, but with companies like Thermite, the option’s already there for the Los Angeles Fire Department, which mobilized one of Thermite’s robotic units back in 2020.

These large fires sometimes cause us to back out our firefighters because we are concerned about the potential for a building collapse. So the utilization of the RS3 will number one enhance firefighter safety and will enable us to sustain a long-term interior aggressive fire attack which will result in faster extinguishment.

Granted a system like the RS 3 still relies on an operator, and that means someone will need to go into the building, but we’ve already seen what Boston Dynamics and its Atlas robot can do and while that haunts my dreams, I can see the utility of sending a metal box into places where a human firefighter might not survive.

However, systems like RS3 and Atlas will mean a few things:

  • Lower operating costs: not a lot of call for health coverage or retirement plans if your employees plug into the wall at night.
  • Fills staffing gaps: unless whatever comes after COVID finally turns the planet into a live-action Last of Us cosplay in the near future, more people means more structures means more things that burn down
  • Takes humans out of the loop: which is one of the primary reasons for robots, anyway

It’s that last one that should worry us, but not for the reasons we normally get sweaty palms about autonomous systems.

The main fear around de-humanizing systems is that those systems will be less safer, or more prone to mistakes, which we’ve seen in cinema from 2001 to RoboCop to Stealth.

For the record, I’ve listed those in descending order of awful, from cinematic masterpiece to glorious satire to just abysmal film drek.

And while those are legitimate concerns, the larger problem, the more dangerous one, is that it reduces even further the power of human labor to effect change.

In future firehouses, like future police stations, construction sites, coffee shops, warehouses, military bases, hospitals, and schools, there will always be humans somewhere in the loop, but they’re going to represent an even more disposable component than they already do.

The increase in automation is indeed being driven by consumption, as companies struggle to produce as much stuff as we’re prepared to buy.

But it’s also being driven systematically by a need to control the trickiest part of any production process: people.

Unionization efforts at Amazon, Starbucks, and CostCo underscore for corporations that they need to find a way to deal with humans only until they can find a way to replace them.

And like the Patriot Act and other similar legislation did when stripping out what shreds of privacy we may have had left at our local libraries, it’s going to happen in the name of safety.

They’ll point to fewer injuries in first responders, reduced harm to civilians during armed responses, less fatigue in the remaining human worker pool at the warehouse.

And then they’ll show us how much better our lives are because they’ve put robots on the job.

Robotic doctors/surgeons/nurses will make fewer mistakes.

Our stuff will get there even faster, because Amazon’s massive delivery network and metrics it collects (like any other major retailer) is nothing more than an ongoing data collection activity train the robots to get shit done.

Our robot army will fend off China’s robot army better than a human army ever could. No more flag draped coffins, just a box of bolts sent back to be melted down to make more soldiers.

A better world, a world where the robots can save our…ball pits.