For a very long time leading up to a little period before the annual DEFCON hackers convention which is hosted in Las Vegas, I stood very firmly on my belief that as much as artificial intelligence is growing in leaps and bounds, it’ll never really reach the level of what humans have to offer each other and what we have to ultimately contribute to our own development trajectory. I mean just a simple example — apparently we’re headed in the direction of sex-robots, but even though one of those is predicted to be able to do just as good as job as any human, I would gather the average person would still prefer interactions such as this and others involved another human being. I could be wrong…
Bringing it all back to a reality which appears to be looming rather imminently, robots are indeed replacing jobs such as those of a factory worker in an assembly-line and even more dangerous jobs such as that of the lead disarmer in a police explosives squad, which I’d say is a good thing rather than a bad thing. Yes, there are going to be many casualties by way of jobs when the transition happens on a massive scale, but it’s perhaps a much-needed paradigm shift in the way we look at ourselves as humans and what we’re essentially doing all we’re doing for.
If you had a fully-stocked fridge within the first two days of the month for instance, your car’s fuel tank was full and all your bills were paid up, would you still go to work to make more money if by some magical corporate mindset shift you were allowed to work on demand and only go back to work if you needed more money? Probably not, unless of course you wanted to make more money to buy something specific or perhaps go away on holiday, or something, but then again that constitutes going to work when you need the for something specific.
So what I’m getting at I guess is that there’ll be a re-alignment of what our roles as human beings are, particularly through what we do for money, i.e. the jobs we do and the business we enter into. We might all work in the financial sector (if it doesn’t collapse under the weight of all the derivative-fuelled speculation and unsecured lending) or as coders of some sort (programming, software engineering, etc) or perhaps even in the service and entertainment sectors.
I mean just try to think about a robot as your wedding photographer. It must be really hard to imagine because although robots can essentially be taught about photographic aspects such as composition, a robot will probably never be able to capture the essence and the soul of your wedding quite like an experienced photographer who has some flair, skill and talent about them. Yes, human photographers also learn about aspects such as composition, but it is their discretion which will perhaps always give them an edge over something which essentially iterates through a series of programmatic instructions which are fed into it.