Humans/Machines and the Future?

Might be the wrong area to be asking, so forgive me if it is.

Looking at the way technology is progressing, it seem fairly obvious the humans are going to become "Obsolete" in regards to being a work force.

At first it will be the more physical jobs, some "Robots" will be able to take over such as farm work (Picking fruit from trees etc.).

Other jobs will just be made totaly obsolete because of "RF ID Tags" for example, I can see super markets where you can just walk in, pick up your goods, walk to a "Chip and Pin" machine enter your bank card and password, your trolly be scaed for its good and then you being charged and walking out, no more need for check out opperators (I think this is already happening in some places with self serve checkouts).

Also as AI improves phone centers etc. will again become obsolete, your PC is not working, you phone up talk to the AI and it probally has a far better understanding of what may be wrong with your computer than any tech support guy could.

Education, I can easily see a time when everything we take our first 20 years in life to learn can just be uploaded to a human brain in a few seconds.

The only real jobs I can maybe see humans in the future having academic and research based, and I would assume that such a world would need the entire population of earth to be employed in this area, only a few hundread thousand at most.

So what happens to the rest of the human race? Just what will we do? With only a few people being employed and most jobs being performed by robots and ai, I could see most things becoming very cheap or free. Do we simply become being of leisure, pluged into some "Matrix" to stem the bordem of everyday life?

Where do people see the human race going? 100 years from now, I think the world will be a VERY diffrent place due to technology.

You should watch this interview with Dr. Michio Kaku, he explains many of the changes out civilization will take in the next few hundred years. There is a thread on it right here.

Also you may want to read a book my Ray Kurzweil "The Singularity is Near". He has some great theories on how we will start to integrate our brains with computers in the next 15 years. www.kurzweilai.net...

Anyhow, I hope I provided some good material for you to chew on.

If computers did it all...who'd do the computers? Yeah, some computers may fix & trouble shoot other computers...but that's probably the only skill field that may remain open for the humans...if it all comes to what it may actually come to.

I sure hope not. I don't want to live in a world dominated by cyborgs or machines.

When that day happens, I'm heading for the hills. I don't want to be connected to a worldwide grid where we can be manipulated from afar.

I want freedom from tyranny, not a centralized tyrannical dictatorship internet connection.

Woot, perfect question for a roboticist.

Yes, the physical aspect of the work force is steadily being replaced by machines. But only on the large scale.

If someone needs allot of product made, all identical to each other, then automated production lines are ideal.

If someone needs a few of a product made, or allot, each with allot of variations, then humans will always hold that market. Why? because humans can adapt immediately, machines have to be reprogrammed and modified for each use.


As for having your computer help done with an AI, that would only be feasible if computer technology didn't change. A human can adapt to new issues with computers far faster than it would take to inform and reprogram a machine to deal with new issues that arise.


You have nothing to fear right now, unless of course your job is working on a mass production line.
Otherwise, it's not economically feasible to design, build, buy, and program machines for each tiny little use. Humans still hold that area.


It is my job to replace people with machines. My life is devoted to it. But I can say with some certainty that we roboticists will never be able to do it completely. Humans are far too adaptable. Machines are precision instruments, designed for specific tasks. It costs money to make each one, and if it costs more to build the manufacturing machines that you will get out of the actual product, you will use humans instead.

The thing i find interesting about the singularity is that if we created AI and it had access to the internet, it could read every single bit of data on the internet so it would know pretty much everything.

I think we will probably see a manifestation device/particle generator before we see the day where we have thousands of robots walking around. And if this doesn't happen by then, it certainly will soon after.

Imagine if we could create anything we wanted out of thin air! just select what you want from a menu or place a pre-existing object onto the device and it will manifest an exact duplicate of it. You would have an endless supply of food & drink, you could easily manifest power supplies or even a new house/car. Why stop there? you could even manifest your own interstellar space-craft or time-machine. Obviously if there was a device capable of such a thing there would be some sort of control placed on it so people can't go around creating time-machines or bombs and such but it would certainly help a lot of starving people without homes. There wouldn't be any need for money or a job because you can manifest anything you need from the device.

Originally posted by Eonnn
The thing i find interesting about the singularity is that if we created AI and it had access to the internet, it could read every single bit of data on the internet so it would know pretty much everything.

They better make them with a really good built in B/S monitor As the old saying goes you cant believe everything you read (especially on the internet) Just think of how mis-informed one of those AI could become.