Will Human labor eventually become obsolete?

If you have called an airline or paid a bill over the phone as of late, there is a good chance you did so without ever taking to a human being. Advances in speech recognition software have allowed totally automated call centers to become more and more common. When you go to some retail outlets, there is now the option to "self checkout" with little or no human intervention. Toll booths are slowly being phased out for transponder corridors that register the toll usage. Slowly we are seeing a trend of automation replacing some jobs. Then you take into account the advances in computer technology. When I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64, It had 64 K memory which was at the time considered cutting edge. Now some twenty five years later, a terabyte of memory is common, which is equivalent to 16 million commodore 64s, at the same price. Even the pessimists give the probability of some form of high order artificial intelligence within decades as at least 10 percent. And when it makes an appearance, there is no reason to think it will experience the same acceleration of development that all other computer technology has experienced. So, at some point, you will have artificial intelligence that can be interfaced into almost any work environment.

I submit at this point in time, most human workers At least in manufacturing and technical jobs,will no longer be needed.

So what happens then? Your thoughts.

It depends on your definition of human labor.

In a general sense i would say, Yes, basic forms of human labor will eventually be done by some form of advance robotics.

However, in another the sense, will robotics ever gain the ability to be creative, ingenious and thoughtful enough to be able to fulfill all forms of labor.

The comment directly above applies to a definition of labor that includes managing work and engineering work. If you consider any form of work "labor", i would say it robotics will not feel these roles and they require inherit human abilities to complete.

Originally posted by MDDoxs


However, in another the sense, will robotics ever gain the ability to be creative, ingenious and thoughtful enough to be able to fulfill all forms of labor.

Uh yeah, AI will be reality in the near future. you also seem to forget humans are easily amused. They already line up for people who can't sing and are just auto-tuned. They line up for wooden actors-actresses who just look good. They line up for canvases smeared with excrement and they call it art. I see no reason they wouldn't line up for robots merely copying human actions as long as they looked sexy.

These are real issues. It is likely continued advancement in Robotics will put most normal people out of work. As for different kinds of labor-You seem to forget most people do not have the intellectual capacity to handle that kind of labor.

One EMP and it's all done.

You can make such a device fit in a backpack for under $400.

But there will always be a need for ditch diggers. And you'd still want them even in a Star Trek like world. In that kind of high tech world, you'd have a lot of people displaced. That means you need other resources to handle them. That means more people would be on the government.

We don't really want that now, do we?

Originally posted by EvilSadamClone
One EMP and it's all done.

You can make such a device fit in a backpack for under $400.

Unless you are carrying something in your backpack big enough to fry unpowered 3-phase, most heavily robotic industries (manufacturing, construction, etc) will be unaffected.

Originally posted by EvilSadamClone
One EMP and it's all done.

You really think a society intelligent enough to invent AI is dumb enough to not safeguard their infrastructure from that kind of a disaster? Heck, even most major economists think income will have to be supplemented in the near future due to these issues. Take a gander at this:
mashable.com...

We are talking about an invention that will put millions of people out of work. No more taxi drivers, bus drivers, truck drivers. Will there be other industries? Maybe. But it is also likely due to the graying of our nation many people will be close to retirement and unable to find work. These romantic notions of physical labor being some kind of scared cow are just fantasies.
www.jaylenosgarage.com...

Take a gander at this, it's even been shown to work on building size scale-there goes construction. So, the question is, will those millions of lost jobs be replaced? Very difficult to say.

This is assuming we don't all blow ourselves to hell or destroy the entire planet before then.

1. Who will think, innovote, build and maintain those robots, even if it can self replicate?

As long as robot are not full fledged rational humans, we humans will never be replaced. When that day comes, what humans can create, so can another come along to destroy it when humanity is threatened.


2. When the Gutenburg press machine was introduced to the world during the middle ages, did it replace scribes for writing? None, as it freed up scribes to be become authors of other works such as authors of new thinking, spreading intelligence to humanity, and further the progress and evolution of mankind socially, scientifically and politcally.

So too when robots become intelligent, but by then, we humanity will be miles and miles ahead deep within the Universe perform unimaginable roles as our ancestors could never imagine the world we created today.


3. There are still jobs that human labour will be a far more cheaper resource to perform than robots, as advance robots, made up of trillions of parts will not be cheap with the annual rise of inflation over commodities. At the very basic level of human function, can a robot give love and warmth to another biological being the way a mother can to another child, and a father who sweats to bring home the bacon because of his love and responsiblity to his own child?

The answer is no, unless mankind is prepared to go the whole hog and be extinct, by delegating such powers to machines and grow mechanised thinking utilitarian humans devoid of warmth and love, and be extinct over time.

Robot armies are of course the driving source for the technology.
Thus humans will still have to work to make the robots.

The whole process is complicated and wonder how it will play out.

reply to post by EvilSadamClone


You think its impossible to build emp shielding into robots?

Seems kind of rediculous to cling to the idea.

reply to post by Wertdagf


Robots are useless without power.

And many power stations are not shielded.

Think about it.

Don't be over confident, and never underestimate a person.