From Isaac Asimov’s 1954 novel, The Caves of Steel
“Every one of us stands the chance of being out of a job.”
Baley said, “Replace us all? Nuts. The trained men to do it with don’t exist.”
“R’s,” said the Commissioner. “They exist.”
“What?
“R. Sammy is just a beginning. He runs errands. Others can patrol the expressways. Damn it, man, I know the Spacers better than you do, and I know what they’re doing. There are R’s that can do your work and mine. We can be declassified. Don’t think differently. And at our age, to hit the labor pool…
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.
“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.” — Scott Adams
“When robots start doing all of the medical research, the speed of discoveries will increase a hundredfold. Robots will simply try every idea until someday there is a cheap pill that keeps your body young and healthy. The government will get out of the healthcare field when the cost of medical services becomes trivial, and I think robots will get us there.” — Scott Adams
“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.” — Mockingbird (Walter Tevis)
“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.” — Scott Adams
“The highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.” — Kevin Kelly
