In several previous columns, I’ve been musing in small doses about the idea that our familiar social structures and institutions — political, cultural, economic, legal, religious, familial, even — are becoming brittle, less relevant by increments, and subject to the evolutionary imperative to change or vanish.

These institutions and social habits have turned brittle because they are designed around no-longer-supportable social agreements and behaviour.

They lack the focus or ambit needed in today’s runaway world. In social scientist Jonathan Haidt’s words, they can no longer perform their “structural missions.”

This pace of social evolution has become normative, producing a change imperative that our skills of adaptation struggle to meet.

The verdict applied to pop music and dances — “so last year” — can now be applied to tech thresholds and breakthroughs.

All of this frames an all-points threat to social order.

I watched a video of a robot making a perfect latte. The voiceover, without irony, asks: “Who needs a barista when you have a machine?”

A baristabot.

Colleague and fellow Times Colonist columnist Trevor Hancock forwarded a New York Times piece about Amazon’s near-future corporate blueprint that calls for its entire operation to be three-quarters performed by robots.

Based on the size of its current workforce, this means a........

© Times Colonist