With a big enough lever I could move the world

"It used to be so much better."

"Back in the good old days."

When's the last time you heard someone say something like that?

Unless they are talking about their lives before a pack of hungry wolves ate their legs and landed them in a wheelchair, effectively ending their career in professional wrestling, the good old days are something that only happened in their bloody imaginations.

I just heard someone regurgitate that tired old argument with a particularly worn out example, going on about how things were so much better before robots started being introduced into the manufacturing industry. Jobs and livelihoods are being lost! Those people have families to feed, too! The children! C'est horrible!

Jobs aren't lost, just transferred from tedious and repetitive labor to other tasks such as design and blah-blah-blah. You are smart people, you've heard this all before, right? There's always some dissatisfaction, when paradigm shift like this occurs, but only for the people "replaced" - their kids will be plenty happy about the development, taking their lives to more interesting places. Would you like to drop what you are doing and go work in front of a conveyor belt?

How about this, then?

Robots are now being used to manufacture things quickly, precisely and economically, the tasks they are capable of getting more and more complex, recently steps being taken towards such cool things as autonomous decision-making and learning. I'm not even going to get into the multitude of narrow AIs that are calling the shots these days in things like stock exchange, beating the crap out of chess grandmasters (in chess), data mining and analysis (Google, yo), but what will happen in the near future is that slowly robotics and AIs are going to be introduced also to the fields that require smarts, not just following set patterns or rules.

Eventually programmers and eventually eventually even scientists will be replaced by more capable machines.

I love it. :)

What will be left - at least for a good while - for the humans to do will be all the creative stuff. Future jobs, I think, will be found in entertainment, design, art and politics. (I don't know, 50 years? Do I look like an old gypsy woman with a crystal ball?) One could extrapolate even further, but for now that would be pointless. Predicting the future reliably beyond certain point in technological advancement is downright impossible, and when things get really crazy, it's a safe bet to assume that the humans of then won't be thinking exactly the way humans today do, anyway.

In any case, robots in industry have created plenty more jobs and opportunities than they have destroyed, and even though I did read that the happiest people on the planet are supposedly found in Bhutan (I think most surveys and the like still reward Denmark with that achievement), I dread to think, what my life quality would be like without the ongoing industrial revolution, not being highborn or anything.

Silly claims like that piss me off and entertain me simultaneously.

Silly rants like this one likewise.

I think I'll make another entry on this a bit later, there's a tangent I feel like prodding.