To the skeptic, futurism is more annoying than instructive. The reason is the futurist is very rarely right about what comes next. Every once in a while, one of them gets something right, but it is always chance. Nassim Taleb is a good example. He became famous for “predicting” the financial collapse at the end of the last decade. Since then he has been on radio, TV and the internet making predictions. None of them have panned out. He’s a smart guy, but he is not a fortune teller, despite acting like one.

What futurists tend to get right is the stuff everyone gets right. For example, mortality rates are 100% over time. Predicting that someone or something will eventually end is not a worthwhile prediction. On the other hand, if you can accurately predict the day someone will die or some trend will reverse, that has value. To date, no one has been able to do that. Similarly, no one has been able to predict the future with a degree of accuracy that is useful. Nothing ages quicker the predictions about the future.

These days, futurists are all in on the robot future. Jobs will go away, except for the smart fraction who will run the robots. The rest of humanity will be on reservations guarded by and tended to by robots. It’s a version of Brave New World, except the robots lower classes will be replaced with robots. The custodial state will resemble a giant day care center with Mary Poppins being made of titanium alloy.

Some go further and think the smart fraction will be replaced by artificial intelligence that will quickly outstrip its human masters. The future then truly becomes a robot future as the robots, presumably, will snuff out the human population or enslave it. After all, if we think we suck as a species, the super-smart robots will surely know it and respond accordingly. Why would the robots perpetuate mankind, when they agree that people are the worst? These futurists, it seems, have a suicide wish.

It is easy to be skeptical about these things. The reason is all past predictions of the future have been hilariously wrong. A standard gag is to dredge up one of these predictions from some prior age and post it on-line. In the 1950’s computers were going to take over the world. OK, that’s right. The trouble is they imagined them to be the size of houses, looking more like space ships than what we have today. The futurists at the dawn of the microprocessor revolution were completely blind to miniaturization.

That’s the thing with the robot future. It skips past the giant obstacle in the way of reaching anything close to it. That is, humans hate fixed rules. We will never tolerate, for example, robot classroom instruction. We could turn over large swaths of college admissions, for example, to robots right now. Kids take a test and are placed according to their IQ and preparation. Instead we do the opposite and deliberately undermine efforts to do so. After all, we can’t have racist robots running admissions.

A better example is the law. We know with an exacting degree of certainty what the writers of the American Constitution intended when they wrote the document. We know the arguments for and against each section. We know what the men who adopted it thought of the provisions. For instance, we know exactly what they intended with the takings clause. Yet, that’s not how the learned men in robes decided a decade ago in the Kelo versus New London Connecticut.

The law, which is how we organize ourselves, will never be robot driven. The reason is we will never permit it. We like changing the rules when it suits our purposes. The Second Amendment is a case in point. The Founders were abundantly clear on the gun issue. They wanted a society where the citizens possessed the weapons of war, in order to be the ultimate check on state power. That means citizens have an unassailable right to own and carry the weapons one expects a solider to carry.

Despite this indisputable fact, we continue to wrestle with accepting this. States refuse to abide by the rules and courts, on occasion, enforce the rules. A robot built by lawyers would kill itself due to the infinite contradictions in its code. Or, it would be forced to kill all of the lawyers trying to get around black letter law. That would be a glorious result, for sure, but that’s why the lawyers will never allow it. The robot future can only happen if it includes a human future better than one without robots.

Instead of a robot future we will get something else. Laws will be passed to limit the use of automation in many areas of life. New ways to tax those that use automation to reduce costs will “level” the playing field. This will give their human intense competitors the emotional lever to use on customers. “Buy from us! We’re 100% Robot Free!” Just as genetically modified foods have come under assault, robots will face the same challenges. Until the robots can wipe us out, they have no future.