[coldtea]

>I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people still think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that their job is safe.

Why don't have any contracts signed with nature on infinite progress. Or that any desired progress will be timely.

We might never be able to pass some local maxima.

Or we might go extinct, or go back to barbarism after a few good wars of famines, before we get to solve some problems.

Or it might take 50 or 100 years in the future to do so.

We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants, flying cars, space colonies, or general AI -- all things that were considered (by experts nonetheless) "just around the corner" in the 60s.

And don't get me started on mass market holographic storage and memsistors...

[onion2k]

We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants...

The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn't see further than a mechanised version of what they already had. On the face of it a robot is a replacement for a physical person, but the reality is that the physical person bit is what's unnecessary. Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible. What was needed was to distill the tasks down to the absolute minimum and then automate that, and that's what we've got now. We automated the physical side of posting a letter and now we have email. We automated filing by using databases instead. Scheduling meetings is now done using shared calendars.

Automation of jobs is not about making a machine that does the job of a person. It's about removing the person and building systems to replace the processes that person did.

We do have robot assistants. They just don't look like robots.

[coldtea]

>The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn't see further than a mechanised version of what they already had.

I'm not so sure. A robot assistant would be very much desired by thousands, as a general replacement for another human (e.g. domestic server, personal trainer, bud to play tennis with, arbitrary help around the house, and don't get my started on sexbots).

>* Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible.*

That might be so, but humans are not factories, and a nice general help anthropomorphic robot would still be very much appreciated. The same way general AI is the holy grail considered to 10000 dedicated processors that can play chess or translate for you.

[crusso]

As you point out, the future is a strange beast to pin down.

It's amazing how people are ready to throw capitalism and scientific advancement out of the window because of where advancement might be headed at some distant point in the future.

Let me know when unemployment shows a trend of rising over the long term because people can't find new lines of work. Then let's talk about putting UBI or other draconian measures in place.

[coldtea]

>It's amazing how people are ready to throw capitalism and scientific advancement out of the window because of where advancement might be headed at some distant point in the future.

Notice the world "headed" -- it's as if it's all out of human control, and the best they should do is strap in for the ride, to whatever it is.

What you characterized as "amazing" can also be described with words like precaution or prudence.

[oldcynic]

For at least some of those things just around the corner, they could have been here, tax cuts and the occasional vastly expensive defence gewgaw were chosen instead.

[crusso]

tax cuts and the occasional vastly expensive defence

Then again, maybe tax cuts allowed private companies to get us further than where we would have been if we had spent ever-more money on government. Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years.

[coldtea]

>Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years.

When they gave up the ghost they weren't that behind. And when they started operations back in 1917, they were vastly behind the US. Plus they got to space (and tons of other space related things) first.

So there's that...

Not to mention the plethora of government funded stuff we take for granted in the West as well -- the internet (ARPA) and the web (CERN) for starters...

(And most of early computing, also heavily subsidized)

[crusso]

The USSR achieved some narrow technical/space/military successes by focusing themselves on those few things and utterly subjugating and impoverishing the rest of their society. And in the end, they couldn't even keep that up. They burned out their economy and produced conditions that could easily have resulted in a civil war there.

There's a reason the USSR felt the need to construct Potemkin villages.