The I newspaper yesterday carried an article on a Black American, who moved to Britain in the 19th century to become this nation’s first Black theatre manager. The thesp in question, Ira Aldridge, has just been awarded his blue own plaque.
The article by Chantal da Silva, on page 19 of Monday’s edition, the 7th August 2017, reads
Britain’s first black Shakespearean actor has been honoured with the unveiling of a blue plaque in Coventry.
Ira Aldridge became manager of the Coventry Theatre in 1828. The actor, who died 150 years ago, put on performances which are believed to have inspired the people of Coventry to petition Parliament to abolish slavery.
Aldridge has now been honoured by the City: the Lord Mayor, Tony Skipper, unveiled a blue plaque celebrating his legacy as the UK’s first black theatre manager.
Professor Tony Howard, of Warwick University’s Multicultural Shakespeare project, said: “He’s been admired and respected for a long time as the first black Shakespearean actor, but people are less aware that the had also been the first black theatre manager.”
The ceremony, marking the 150s anniversary of Aldridge’s death, was attended by Earl Cameron, an actor who was trained by Aldridge’s daughter, Amanda.
Aldridge was born in New York in 1807 and worked as an actor in the US until the 1820s when he migrated to England and being brutally beaten in racist attacks. He rose to fame in the UK, managing to break down racial barriers, playing principal roles, including Romeo, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.
The theatre building that Aldridge managed was demolished long ago, but the permanent memorial marks the site where it stood.
This is an excellent move, as Black activists have complained that there are too few blue plaques for great Black historical figures. I also think Radio 4 may have put on a programme about Aldridge way back in the 1990s. All I can remember of the programme was that it was about a Black American actor who came to Britain, and that he played Othello in whiteface. This sounds very much like Aldridge. As for playing Othello in Whiteface, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t, as at the time and for a very long time afterwards the part was usually played by a White actor in makeup. I think that tradition might have been ditched a few years ago, after people understandably complained.
On Friday, Mike also put up a piece commenting on how Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of William Rees-Mogg, the former Times and Independent journalist, has developed a cult following. Apparently he has his own fan group, dubbed Moggmentum in imitation of Corbyn’s greater and far better supporter’s group. Mike also supports his comments with a couple of Tweets from fans, who rave about how he has ‘class’, is better than ‘left-liberal misfits who would ruin the country’, and how ‘England needs him’.
As Mike then goes on to show, Jacob Rees-Mogg is the kind of right-wing politico Britain really doesn’t need. He is, of course, Eton-educated, and as his voting record shows, he believes in punishing the poor simply for being poor, while also demanding that Tory Toffs like himself get generous state handouts to retain their position of power.
In a long list of the policies favoured by the man dubbed ‘the minister for the 18th century’, Mike shows that
He generally votes against laws to extend equality and human rights.
Consistently votes for cuts to welfare spending.
Consistently votes against gay rights.
General votes against laws to tackle climate change.
Consistently supports the extension of the surveillance state.
Consistently voted against raising support payments for the long term ill or disabled.
Consistently votes against government spending to create jobs for young people, who have been unemployed for some time.
Nearly always votes for restricting the right of EU nationals to remain in Britain.
He was also nearly always in favour of reducing access to legal aid.
He was also a solid supporter of tuition fees, the bedroom tax and against raising unemployment benefit in line with rising prices.
As Simon Renshaw says in his Tweet, which Mike has also posted in his article, Rees-Mogg is not amusing. He is cruel, deplorable and dangerous. And another Tweeter, Paul, also commented
Sperminator Rees-Mogg would not govern for the people, he would rule for his class with a selective dose of his religion thrown in.
This last comment is extremely accurate. Rees-Mogg began his career as a politician by campaigning for the Tories in a depressed fishing area in Fife in Scotland. When asked what he would be campaigning on, Rees-Mogg declared that he would be trying to convince the locals that the country would be best served by retaining an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. Somehow, I’m not surprised he didn’t succeed on this occasion. The Scots aristocracy, led by the Duke of Buccleuch, had a greater degree of political power north of the border than their counterparts further south, until the guid Duke and his ilk were stripped of them by the Labour government in 1975. And obviously, the unkempt masses weren’t keen to bring them back. Given the spectacle of this strange, gangling figure stalking about the streets and vennels and addressing the locals in a cut-class, pukka Etonian accent, I suppose it was almost inevitable that the SNP would suddenly receive a massive boost in support. Heaven knows how he’d have got in Govan or the rougher parts of Glesgae toon.
A few years ago, Private Eye did a little feature on him as part of their series on the new boys and girls, who had entered parliament after that year’s election. Not only does Rees-Mogg expect people to defer to him because of his class, he also expects close family members to protect him personally in uncomfortable situations. By which I mean that once, at Glyndebourne, he got his nanny and his wife to hold a book over his head to protect him from the sun.
The aristocracy are also known for inflicting stupid names on their children. Rees-Mogg is no exception. Along with the normal names he has given his new-born son, Dominic and Christopher, he also inflicted ‘Sextus’ and ‘Dominic’ on the poor little mite. ‘Sextus’ is Latin for ‘Sixth’, and the little chap is his sixth sprog.
So why would anyone become a fan of this weird creature? I think part of it’s because he is so strange, as well as being personally very polite. He has a diffident, gentlemanly manner while at the same time he stands out as something of a character. He’s similar to Boris Johnson in this respect, who’s built his career on a very carefully crafted persona of being a good-natured chump, while he’s anything but in real life. Quietly spoken with a slightly diffident manner, it makes Rees-Mogg look for more harmless and reasonable than he actually is. But as his voting record shows, his political views are those of a typical vengeful Tory thug with all their class hatred and contempt for working people.
Rees-Mogg is a particular presence in my part of the world, because he’s the MP for North-East Somerset, which is just south of my bit of Bristol. I’m not surprised he got in down there. This is the same part of rural Somerset, where the Waldegrave family have their seat. There’s even a pub called ‘The Waldegrave Arms’ in Green Ore, one of the villages there on the Waldegrave estate. This is a part of Britain, where they still feel people should be tugging their forelocks in deference to the lord of the manor.
As for his supporters, from what I’ve heard personally, they’re deeply reactionary, true-blue members of the upper middle class, who really do want to drag us all back to the 19th century, when the upper classes were in power and the proles knew there place – in hovels, suffering from malnutrition and cholera.
There’s some speculation that the Tories are looking to put him into No. 10 at one point. Mike states that he’s not likely to go away, and we shall all do our best to make sure he doesn’t get in. If he does, you can bet that all the poverty, despair, joblessness and starvation the Tories have inflicted on the working class, disabled and poor in this country really will reach truly 19th century levels.
Statue of an actor from ancient Rome. Or an earlier incarnation of Theresa May, who was stuck like it when the wind changed.
This is another ad feminam attack. But, as Barry Norman never said, ‘and why not?’ The Tory press has made enough of them against Jeremy Corbyn.
My father the other day observed that May seemed to walk peculiarly, like a duck with haemorrhoids. I suggested that it might be due to over thirty years of bad Tory policies causing constipation. As it is, her speeches remind me of the works of Grunthos the Flatulent and his epic, 12 book poetry cycle, Zen and the Art of Going to the Lavatory in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
So for better gastric health, vote her out, and Labour in.
I know this is ad feminam, but I couldn’t resist it. Not when the Tory press has flung out so many ad hominem attacks at Labour politicos and trade unionists over the years.
In his article on Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May running away from the British public yesterday, Mike has a photo of the Tory leader in full grimace.
Looking at her, I was reminded of a picture of a Roman statue of an actor, now in the Petit Palais Museum in Paris.
It all brings to mind what Frankie Howerd would’ve said as Lurcio in Up Pompeii, ‘Titter ye not! Oooooh, she’s off again! Don’t mock! You mustn’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’
Howerd was one of the greatest funny men this country has produced, who gave millions joy with his own brand of comedy. May and the Tories are also clowns, but it’s a black farce and the only laughter is what Russian writers call ‘the laughter through tears’.
The ancient Greek word for ‘actor’ is ‘hypocrite’. And that’s what the Tories are: massive hypocrites, pretending to care about ordinary people, ending poverty, protecting the NHS, while doing the exact opposite.
Help end their hypocrisy and cruelty by voting Labour on June 9th.
Another Tory, who lies about food banks also surfaced two months. Edwina Curry responded to comment by Buddy Hell of Guy Debord’s Cat on Twitter with the statement that she was a 70 year old pensioner, who occasionally works for the BBC and is on low pay and benefits.
The Cat had remarked that it was all right for her to sneer, as she didn’t have to rely on benefits to top up poor wages from work. And that was her response.
The Cat comments further on her reply that
She’s on low pay and she receives benefits? I doubt that. As the poster below remarks, she receives a generous final salary pension to which all former MPs are entitled. Although she may not be, in her words “filthy rich”, she has the kind of income that many pensioners can only dream of. Her appearance on I’m A Celebrity netted her a cool £100,000. As for her appearances on the BBC, let’s put it this way: she won’t be earning peanuts. Currie and her second husband also own two (possibly more) properties.
He also speculates that perhaps she thought he’d forgotten her comments about salmonella in eggs and her four year affair with John Major.
he concludes
If Currie thinks her pension isn’t enough for her to live on, maybe she could get a job at her local supermarket? Just a thought.
No, Edwina Currie is very definitely not a poor pensioner. In fact, from what I’ve seen of her performances on television, she has absolute contempt for them, just like she and her party has for anyone else who’s poor. About a decade ago she turned up on the Clive Anderson show. Anderson asked her about the furore she caused when she was in Major’s government. The government had decided to cut pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. This understandably upset very many people. Curry’s response was to tell them to ‘wrap up warmly’. She repeated her comments, and added a snide remark about how it would ‘teach them’.
This offhand sneer at poor senior citizens went down as well as you would expect: the audience started booing.
This provoked an amazed response from Curry – she started peering around with the kind of fixed smile people put on when they know something’s not quite right, but don’t understand what. She really, really couldn’t understand how anyone could find her comment offensive.
She’s another one who’d fail the Turing test. In fact, there are probably ZX81s still out there, with 1 byte of memory, that stand a better chance of passing for human.
She also comes across as incredibly thick. She’s an Oxford graduate, and presumably had a very expensive education, but you do wonder how she got in. Way back in the 1990s, when Have I Got News For You was still more than halfway funny, she tried locking horns with Ian Hislop. Answering a question about some legal tussle she’d been involved in, she looked across to the editor of Private Eye and remarked ‘Aren’t you glad I didn’t sue you?’
To which Hislop frostily replied ‘Aren’t you glad, my dear!’
I think she’s now an MP for Derby. She turned up a few years ago on a documentary about starvation in Britain and the rising use of food banks. She was interviewed to give the Tory line. So standing in the middle of a bank’s stores, she repeated the lie that people weren’t using them because they were starving, but because it was cheap food.
Wrong. You can only use a food bank if you’ve got a chit referring you from the Jobcentre.
This was pointed out to her by the presenter. But, like a good little follower of Goebbels on the art of political lying, she repeated the lie.
She also made another appearance on a chat show a few years ago, in which she made much of her Liverpool roots. She put up on the accent, and tried to pass herself off as a real ‘Dicky Sam’.
Liverpool’s a great city. It has given the world the Beatles, Hornby Railways and Meccano. It has a brilliant museum and art gallery, and was one of the first museums in Britain to open a display on its role in the slave trade. In the 19th century, it’s literary and philosophical society was a major centre of scientific research in England. It has also produced the great writer and playwright, Alan Bleasdale. Unfortunately, Edwina Curry has also appeared to lower the tone.
She’s another Tory liar with a contempt for the poor, who tries to hide it behind further lies.
Another day, another example of how absolutely, constitutionally unsuited for government, or even civilised company, Donald Trump is. Yesterday there was the news that Trump had managed to insult the Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, and threatened the president of Mexico with invasion.
Trump had been discussing an agreement signed last November between Obama and the Ozzies in which America promised to take a few of the refugees coming to Australia, who were temporarily settled in the camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Dictator Drumpf really doesn’t like the idea of taking prospective immigrants to Oz, and made his opposition very plain. According to the Washington Post, the orange megalomaniac told Turnbull that it was ‘the worst deal ever’, accused the Ozzie PM of trying to send him the next Boston bombers and said he was worried that the deal would kill him politically. He also told Turnbull that he’d already spoken to four national leaders that morning, including Putin, and that this was the ‘worst call so far’. The phone call was expected to last an hour, but Drumpf rang off after only 25 minutes.
Here’s the Young Turks video in which John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian discuss Trump’s highly undiplomatic phone call.
Then there are reports that in his phone call to the Mexican president, Trump is supposed to have accused the Mexican army of cowardice in trying to sort out the drug cartels, and threatened to send US troops to do the job instead. He is claimed to have said
‘You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.’
There have been denials that this was ever said from the Mexican president’s office, but it appears to be true. John Iadarola, discussing the report in the video below, suggests that the denial might be an attempt by President Pena Nieta to save face. When he stood up to Drumpf last week, his approval ratings unsurprisingly shot up. Trump talking to him like this looks like a humiliation, and so he may have wanted to cover it up to prevent his approval ratings plummeting accordingly. It does, however, unfortunately seem to be true.
Iadarola and Kasparian make the point in the video about Trump’s insulting phone call to Premier Turnbull that Drumpf is perfectly happy to bomb the nations of the Middle East, but as soon as their citizens want to move out and seek refuge in America, he’s gets upset. In fact Australia’s immigration policy is itself highly controversial. I can remember Duncan Steele, an Australian astronomer at one of the British universities, saying at the Cheltenham Festival of Science in the 1990s that their treatment of refugees made him ashamed to be an Ozzie.
As for the drug war in Mexico, the drug cartels are indeed ‘bad hombres’. Actually, I think that term gives a romantic gloss to gangs of utter scum, who are completely subhuman in their cruelty and barbarism. In one of the Mexican provinces where they’re particularly strong, the gangs were engaged in feminicido – feminicide – as a kind of very sick sport. They got their kicks raping and killing women. And far from being cowards, the Mexican cops, who take them on are as hard as nails. A few years ago the on-line humour magazine, Cracked, did a list of the toughest real life vigilantes. Top of the list was a secret organisation of Mexican coppers, dedicated to rubbing out the gangs and their members. The identities of their members were unknown, to prevent reprisals against their families. The overall impression given was that these men were like the Punisher, but even more ruthless and absolutely dedicated.
I’ve no doubt that the Mexican army isn’t as good, as well trained or as well equipped as the Americans. But considering that America and her allies are still in Iraq and Afghanistan after nearly a decade and a half, I really don’t see that the Americans would have any more success in dealing with the drug cartels than the Mexican authorities.
Quite apart from the fact that you don’t tell the head of a friendly neighbouring state that you’re going to invade his country if he doesn’t sort a domestic problem out. Trump really has no idea how that sounds, not just to other nations generally, but specifically to Latin Americans. There’s considerable resentment of America in Central and South America, particularly in Argentina. It dates from the 19th century. Before then, many Spanish American liberals were solidly in favour of the US as the kind of modern, progressive country they wished their nations to be.
Then the US invaded Mexico, and causing these intellectuals to reverse their previous positive attitudes. They became bitterly resentful of what they saw as the US’s contemptuous, colonialist treatment of Latin America. It was the start of what I think is called ‘Arielismo’, in which South America writers used the character of Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the brutish servant of the wizard Prospero, as a metaphor for the imperialist contempt with which they perceived Americans treated their Spanish-speaking neighbours to the south and their culture.
The Young Turks in the video above also talk about how Trump’s brusque, insulting treatment of his Mexican opposite number may imperil the NAFTA trade agreement with Mexico. This has resulted in a loss of jobs in America, as firms have shifted their locations south to take advantage of the cheaper labour there. But they argue that it has also benefited America.
Trump is clearly one of the most undiplomatic presidents in American history. You really do wonder how long it will be before this loudmouthed buffoon starts another bloody war, or a major international incident, simply because he can’t keep a civil tongue in his head.
He can’t even be counted on to behave decently with our head of state. Mike a few days ago carried a story on his site that Prince Charles had been told not to lecture Drumpf on global warming, if he meets him, as otherwise the Orange Supremacist will ‘explode’. Now I’m well aware that not everyone reading this site is a monarchist, and the exaggerated deference, with which they’re treated should definitely go. I’m referring to all those arcane rules of behaviour, which dictate that you must only talk to the queen if she speaks to you. Those rules should have no place in the 21st century. But that does not excuse another head of state from going on a rant at ours.
This is a little break from politics. Looking around the Net, I found a number of Rock/ Heavy Metal bands from India and Pakistan. Here’s two of them. This Punkh, a Hindi band, performing with the German robot rockers, Compressorhead.
And this is The Nuke, a band from Pakistan, performing their track, Waaday (Promises).
I don’t speak either Hindi or Urdu, and so have no idea what the lyrics mean. However, the music’s good, solid Rock and they both have the genuine spirit and aesthetic. I’ve put them up because they both contradict western perceptions of these nations’ culture. Unless you have some contact with these communities, you simply don’t expect either country to have anything in the way of Rock music. My guess is that most people in Britain would think of Ravi Shankar and sitar music, Bollywood, and possibly Bhangra in connection with Indian music. As regards Pakistan, most of our impressions of the area are reports of terrorism and Islamic militancy. There have, however, been concerts over here of Pakistani musicians performing traditional Sufi music. This shows an entirely different side of these nations’ culture and their music.
As the Alt-Right starts settling into a position of power through their links to Trump, any pretense that they’re remotely mainstream is rapidly coming off, and their true Fascist face is coming through. In this piece from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, Michael Brooks comments on an Alt-Right meeting at the weekend in which the movement’s leader, Richard Spencer, laid bare the movement as White Nationalism. He declared that White people were the children of the sun, a race of conquerors and creators, who had been marginalised in contemporary America. At the end of the speech, a group of three of his stormtroopers cried ‘Hail Trump’ and ‘Sieg Heil’, with Nazi salutes.
Brooks comments that there are three components to the Alt-Right. One could be described as neo-Fascist, neo-Nazi or neo-Dixiecrat. Another section was people clustered around computer games. And then there was this, which was simply Fascist or Nazi.
He goes on to say that he would like to have Scott Atran on the programme. Atran’s an anthropologist, who conducted research interviewing terrorists, exploring what attracted people to it, and particularly what attracted young men. He’d like to ask him what was attracting young American men to the Alt-Right. He states that some of it is the sense of meaninglessness prevalent in late stage capitalism. He can see how this would attract young people to terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s more obscure in North America, but nevertheless it’s still a factor.
He also notes the role of sexual frustration. He states that he is not making this comment out of snark, but these men are putting all their emotional and sexual frustration and projecting it on to society. He notes that one of the two men in the photo has ‘hover hands’, the gesture some men make, who would like to touch their female companion, but are afraid to do so. Fascists are afraid of everyone, including women.
This last comment is very accurate. A large section of the Alt-Right seems to be Men’s Rights activists, who are bitterly anti-feminist. And many of them seem to resent the female gender simply because women don’t fancy them. Kevin Logan in his series of vlogs ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’ covers these individuals. Each of his vlog posts is on an individual denizen of the manosphere, who, in his view, is trying to drag our species back into the sea. The series now includes more than 30 posts. Not all of these men are misogynists through sexual frustration, but it accounts for a fair number.
The Nazi and Fascist movements considered themselves to be male, anti-feminist movements. They appealed to men of extreme right-wing views, who felt threatened by feminism. The Futurists, an artistic movement of militantly techno-Fascists, which celebrated the car, the aeroplane, the new machine age, speed and violence, declared in their manifesto that they advocated ‘scorn for women’. Ludwig Theweleit, a German historian, has gone further in the case of Nazism, arguing in his book, Male Fantasies, that it had a very strong homosexual component. This has been taken up in its turn by the American Right, who have argued that Nazism was militantly gay. 75 per cent of the SA were homosexual, but they were wiped out by Hitler during the internal purge of the Night of the Long Knives, and male homosexuals were interned in the concentration camps during the Third Reich. I think Sir Ian MacKellen acted in play about the imprisonment of gays by the Nazis in the 1980s, called Bent. In the case of the American Right and the Republican party, the homosexual element in the Nazi party is used to smear gays and the gay rights movement. The argument seems to be a simple syllogism: the Nazis were all gay, therefore, all gays are Nazis, or gay rights is a Nazi plot. It’s specious rubbish, like most of the stuff the Right spouts. Nevertheless, it’s believed.
Regardless of their sexuality, the Alt-Right is now a growing menace in America, and their potential to harm millions of people, and empower similar movements on this side of the Pond, is immense and terrifying. We need to stop them. Now.
Also looking around the bookshelves last Friday, I found that someone has written a new biography of Benjamin Netanyahu. And from it’s title, somehow I don’t think it’s going to be complimentary about the Israeli leader. It’s called The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu. This seems to be a reference to the Bertold Brecht play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which was a parable about the rise of Adolf Hitler. This portrayed the Nazi leader as an Italian gangster. It’s a pretty fair description of Hitler’s character and the way the Nazis themselves behaved in the 1920s and early 1930s, when they were involved in street fights with leftists and Jews and planned assassinations, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS exterminated the ‘left-wing’ branch of the Nazi party, the SA. Historians of Nazism and the Third Reich, and politicians, who lived through this period have described Nazis as gangsters.
I’ve no doubt that Netanyahu will secretly bridle at the comparison. In the past, Israeli spokesmen have angrily denounced any comparisons between their country and the Third Reich as ‘anti-Semitic’. But the Israeli state has adopted many of the same murderous policies as Hitler’s Germany. It’s been engaged in a decades-long campaign of terror and murder against the Palestinians, with the ultimate aim of seizing their land and forcing them out of their ancestral homelands. Mass murder has been an integral part of this policy.
While comparisons with Nazi Germany are offensive, they’re also apt. And if the Israelis don’t want people to make those comparisons, their government should not act like Nazis and Fascists.
I’ve put up several posts this week about robots and robotics, discussing the ultimate origins of H.B.O.’s WestWorld in Karel Capek’s 1920 play about a robot revolt, R.U.R. This has been performed using real, lego robots, and a short speech about the play given by a British robot, Robothespian, by Café Neu Romance at the National Technical Library in Prague. Robothespian also appeared on the BBC’s Breakfast TV show a couple of years ago in 2014.
The humanoids in WestWorld are less like today’s industrial machines and far more like the Replicants in Blade Runner or Capek’s original robots. They’re a kind of artificial biology created through synthetic chemistry, and produced through something like 3D printing, rather than today’s mechanical devices. Scientists are, however, exploring various synthetic materials, which would expand and contract similar to the way animal muscles move, which gives WestWorld’s humanoids a grounding in scientific fact, even if we are still a very, very long way away from such complex, truly intelligent and self-aware artificial beings.
Looking through some of the videos on robots on YouTube, I found the short video below for a small, humanoid robot, Poppy, created by a group of French scientists and engineers. This is interesting, as it shows how far robot technology has come, including their manufacturing methods, and how close we are to a true age of popular robotics. The machine is bipedal, and designed to be used as a research tool by scientists. It’s also open source and can be made at home using a 3D printer. It’s creators state that it’s a robot for everyone, and so while it can be used for serious research – the video shows the machine walking along a treadmill, for example – it is not solely for professional robotics scientists, but aimed at a popular market.
This brings the world of R.U.R. and other, similar works of SF, where everyone owns a robot, just that bit closer. Along with Star Trek’s universe, in which anything can be produced using a replicator, an idea which the late Arthur C. Clarke explored in his book, Profiles of the Future, some decades ago. Robots pose serious problems in the mass redundancies that have occurred and are threatening to become worse through their adoption in industry, as well as the possibility that they will overthrow and replace humanity as the dominant beings when their intelligence eventually exceeds ours. 3D printing also has its drawbacks and problems for the economy. One of these is how people will be able to make a living from manufacturing, when nearly anything at all can be made cheaply by anyone at home with a printer. We haven’t reached that stage yet, and possibly never will. Nevertheless, it’s a serious issue that needs careful consideration and debate.
Poppy isn’t the only open source robot available that can be created through 3D printing. A glance through some of the other videos available on this subject on YouTube shows that there are a number of them. No doubt this will grow as the technology improves and costs drop so that the technology becomes more affordable. Assuming that everyone isn’t put out of work by then as more firms decide its cheaper to employ machines than people.
