Category Archives: Science & Technology

The Coming Technology Boom

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“Politics is grim but science is working”

I’ve long believed technology would be our salvation. We’re not going to become better, more enlightened people. But our tech will get better and better, despite the efforts to “make America great again.” This NYT op-ed reinforced that (and made me feel good). Like all human progress, this will come with difficulties:

“What happens to people who work on ranches if labs take a significant share of the market? The political difficulties will be complicated by the fact that the people who will profit from these high-tech industries tend to live in the highly educated blue parts of the country, while the old industry workers who would be displaced tend to live in the less educated red parts.”

Like your mom told you: Study hard and stay in school.

“I prefer the term, Synthetic Person”

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It’s impossible for me watch this and not believe we’ll see a day when it will be nearly impossible to distinguish between the best robots and humans. Oh sure, you be able Turing Test them and know which is which. But they don’t need to be human like to be very useful to humans.

Could one of these clean the hospital room of a COVID patient? Disarm that camper bomb in Nashville? Will one of these guys take me upstairs to my office when I’m no longer able to climb the stairs.

You an go all RoboCop and Terminator on this but I choose to believe we’ll find more good uses than bad. And perhaps the Boston Dynamics guys can build in some failsafes for when they’re misused.

PS: This video has been viewed almost 9 million times in the last 24 hours.

Seven Stages of Robot Replacement

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  1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.
  2. [Later] OK, it can do a lot of this tasks, but it can’d do everything I do.
  3. [Later] Okay, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.
  4. [Later] OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.
  5. [Later] OK,OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.
  6. [Later] Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more interesting and pays more!
  7. [Later] I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possible do what I do now.

[Repeat]

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly (2016)