[imiric]

That's insightful, thanks. I'm indeed not aware of the complexities here. It's not my domain at all.

I love the quote at the end of that article you linked:

> As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

I should've picked a safer career in gardening...

[BoiledCabbage]

> We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.

This other content really jumps out at me as well because it's extremely true.

Even older than walking and manual dexterity are really basic abilities like eating. We're nowhere close on that - were so far off it's not on anyone's radar. Robots will run on batteries or some other form of power - there is no way anyone is close to building robots that can eat break down food and use it for energy and repair. One of the oldest evolutionary traits.

The other is course being procreation. Will a robot be able to assemble a new one from pre-made parts? Likely not too far off. But could a robot build or grow one from scratch? That's so far off in the sci-fi future it's silly.

[imiric]

> Robots will run on batteries or some other form of power - there is no way anyone is close to building robots that can eat break down food and use it for energy and repair.

Couldn't we sidestep the complexity of digestion and just get energy from the Sun? With improvements in solar cells and battery technology, we wouldn't need to engineer something as complex as extracting nutrients from food.

I don't think we'd want to replicate biological systems in robots. Digestion and procreation happen at the cellular level, and achieving that with technology is indeed hard sci-fi. Autonomous humanoid robots can exist and be useful for us without this level of sophistication. Though once this happens AI itself will be capable of self-improvement, so we can leave it up to them how they want to improve. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. :)