But now it's the cognitive function that's being automated. What is left for people to trade in exchange for their food? Until now, everyone had to offer his work, and work was tied to each person, couldn't be copied and replicated. But from now on, people will have nothing that can't be replaced by machines. Maybe a few will still have jobs, but most won't. Hopefully we will be able to spread soon enough the benefits of this revolution with everyone, and overcome this period of concentration of power in the hands of very few. But in the meantime, the generation of sacrifice will have to be helped to survive without jobs. Of course, if the transition would take 100-200 years, then there would be much less suffering in the intermediary phase, but that's unlikely to happen.
"Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable."---Stanisław Lem
Power has always been concentrated in the hands of the few. What we see is that power is being moved from the hands of a human elite to a mob of machines. The loss of work is only a prelude to a loss of purpose.
Power is still firmly in the hands of those with capital, the difference is now they don't need you any more.
This at the end of the day will lead to a war of sorts, and my bet would be on the ones with the capital and the power.
Against the useless masses that have been turned into little more than wild animals by machines.
Whether it's the machines that produce or the machines that make war, they are going to be owned by a few and they can then use them to dictate civilization.
Would not be surprised if in the near future some corporate CEO declares himself emperor of the world.
Imagine if the Android phones right now were actual androids, all billion of them, run by a single corporation's operating system. Over night that corporation could take power over the entire world and no one could stop them.
> Against the useless masses that have been turned into little more than wild animals by machines.
The argument from self reliance: I don't think people will become a "useless mass that has been turned into little more than wild animals", though. We will still be able to work directly for ourselves and to cooperate with other humans. We will work for self reliant subsistence. We will grow our own food, make our own clothes and tools, just like today, even using future technology that is still accessible to regular people.
An economic argument: Even if robots can make the same products cheaper, people won't have money to pay for them. So there will be a fall in economic production by robots for humans. On the other hand, people will need things, and still be able to work just like today. In order to solve the problem, we will need a new currency that is based on human self-reliant work. We will need to have a double economy, one for robots and human elites, one for poor people. But nothing is stopping people from working to earn a living. In the extreme case, a small plot of land could feed many and require almost nothing external, so no dependence on robots owned by the elites.
This kind of self-reliance is a last ditch measure. Before that happens, I think it is more probable that sufficiently advanced robots will be universally available, not just for big corporations, just like cell phones. We need to keep AI, robotics and 3D printing in the open source, so we can all share in the returns.
I think there will be a big boom in self-reliant living solutions. Modern farms, 3d-printing, solar panels - we need to bootstrap ourselves in such a way as to be independent from robots. We don't need to be pessimistic, humans have survived worse situations in our 200,000 years long history.
Why do you think the march will stop then? Since machines are better at humans, why wouldn't the hypothetical corporation simply fire the corporate CEO and replace him with a machine?
Hard AI will come a significant amount of time after automation and robotics. So there will be a time between the time where there is hard AI and now where CEOs can potentially rule the world.
Why would those be purposes? A single person may want to contemplate, laugh, love, bliss, etc., but it's not a justification for his/her existence. And it would be remarkably egoistic and empty if I want to enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle.
For me, the purpose for humans is to serve other humans, to work. Which we are increasingly unable to do because it turns out that this 'work' can be more easily done by mechanical brutes that happen to be programmed by humans.
Oh, not necessarily egotistic, at all. Sharing and spreading knowledge and wisdom and calmness can be a noble purpose. Helping those in need is one form of true love.
Work will disappear for most of us. What will we do with our time?
I don't know. But I think that if we ever get to that point, then it would probably lead to a doomsday scenario of existential angst. Anything that happens after that...is really a boring footnote in the history of machinery's triumph over humanity.
Still, there's differing levels of dystopia. One where humans are still able to help each other is certainly better than most alternatives.
Those historical examples are about the automation of physical effort. The ability to automate tasks that require mental effort is fundamentally new to humanity.
There have been plenty of historical examples of automated mental effort from Wall Street trading, to telephone switching, to legal research, to librarians, record keeping, accounting, logistics management, forestry overwatch, security, safety regulation, meter reader, parking enforcement, communication, art, banking, many examples throughout history.
Sure; but the things you describe are levers, not automata.
We are approaching the point where there are humans who are not needed physically, and not smart enough to do something that can't be automated. It's a slowly rising tide.
Calculators automate at least some "mental effort" and have existed since 2000BC. Perhaps you mean creativity? But even in that case automating composition of music was experimented with as early as the 1960s.
Certainly our ability to automate is much more refined than in the past, but I fail to see the fundamental shift you describe.