IMAGINE THAT 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?

Well...probably fuck and fight and fuck up the world. But seriously, can we cut the alarmist subtitle that gets de-alarmed in the opening paragraphs.

This article seems like a text version of Human's Need Not Apply, the video that went massively viral last summer and sparked crazy controversy all over my facebook feed (do NOT tell creatives and liberal arts kids a robot can do their job!) This subject is always an interesting path of thought to go down and I'm glad this got posted simply for rezzeJ's comment. I enjoy taking short walks down this path but refuse to go too deep. The reality is, we have no idea how this is going to play out. We will have more and more robots. We will have AI. We probably won't refer to either of those things using those words though.

Maybe I should read more books on the subject, as I consciously and subconsciously think about Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect whenever considering this subject. (cc mhr) This is proven by the fact my opening sentence of this comment is violence and sex – same as the opening chapters of Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. We can consider all the infinite possibilities of what will happen as we evolve, but all that does is ensure that that consideration is not the right one. Typically, I am confident in my assumption that human's primal nature will survive in some format and that sex and violence will persevere. However, Japan has stopped having sex and it's only getting worse, so not even that is a safe assumption.

We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can.

That's about where I stand as well, although I am not as eager or welcoming of our new overlords. But evolution is evolution and we should probably just evolve into robots already. We probably need to cut back on every decision we make being marred by religion first though. That's only going to hinder our evolution and give me a fat headache in the process.

Interesting article. It's related to the dissertation I'm currently writing too (Can Computers Be Original/Have Original Ideas/Create Original Art?), so I'll count reading it as research. An intriguing area that this article touches upon throughout but never outrightly acknowledges is 'The Adjacent Possible.' This is a theory on the evolutionary process of life, but it has increasingly been applied to ideas and creation as well.

Put simply, it states that at any time in the present moment, creativity/evolution is limited to all the current combination of things we have around us right now. As such you can only see or predict what might happen in the future through the lens of these current possibilities. In the more evolutionary tinged context:

Think of all those initial molecules, and then imagine all the potential new combinations that they could form spontaneously, simply by colliding with each other (or perhaps prodded along by the extra energy of a propitious lightning strike). If you could play God and trigger all those combinations, you would end up with most of the building blocks of life: the proteins that form the boundaries of cells; sugar molecules crucial to the nucleic acids of our DNA. But you would not be able to trigger chemical reactions that would build a mosquito, or a sunflower, or a human brain. Formaldehyde is a first-order combination: You can create it directly from the molecules in the primordial soup. Creating a sunflower, however, relies on a whole series of subsequent innovations: chloroplasts to capture the sun's energy, vascular tissues to circulate resources through the plant, DNA molecules to pass on instructions to the next generation...

...The phrase ['the adjacent possible'] captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

What I find equal parts exciting and worrying is that a computers/robots potentially have the ability to create and figure out these possible combinations much quicker than a human can. They are limited presently by their ability to decipher what actually is a 'valid' or worthy combination, but I'm sure that will come.

If you pair this with the hypothetical future scenario where intelligent computers have access to the tools with which to upgrade themselves, they could quickly overtake and exponentially distance themselves from the human race. They could come become private entities. What's more, they will be generating these connections so fast that what they up come with may perhaps be incomprehensible to us humans. They might create beautiful pieces of art or revolutionary ideas that we simply cannot understand.

Perhaps that Ludwig Wittgenstein remark is applicable here: "If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him." The frames of reference and life forms of humans and computers/robots could grow so distant that there is no longer any links.

This comment went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I though it was an nice concept that the article could've explored more. I have yet to research the opposing side of these arguments on the whole AI debate at the moment, so I'm aware this comment may be a lopsided in that regard.