Take me to your leader

Interesting Mysterious Universe released today which weirdly involved something I’ve been reading and thinking about lately…artificial intelligence.

It seems that a leading AI researcher has predicted that the event known as the singularity will happen around the year 2045. For those not in the know, the singularity is the point when computers will become self aware. I’m actually surprised that it will take this long to reach that point as technology advances exponentially.

Just this last week Watson, the IBM computer, played Jeopardy against the two best human players to ever play the game and beat them. The technology behind Watson is amazing. Sure, humans built and programmed Watson, but without human tampering Watson “listened” to the questions, “comprehended” them, analyzed them and then answered them. Here is a very cool story about Watson: http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/17/ibm-researcher-explains-what-watson-gets-right-and-wrong/

It’s all very fascinating and a little scary. Now, I’m not too worried about robots rising up and taking over, but I do worry about them further pushing humans from many menial labor jobs. Fast food service, customer service, sales…I would think that more and more of these jobs and others are bound to disappear. With a population that is continually growing this has the makings of a perfect storm.

But I guess we’ve been dealing with a human labor versus technology clash for a long time. The Internet has changed the way people shop and have succeeded in all but burying traditional brick and mortar retail venues. Video rental stores, book stores and music stores have been replaced with Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. And that’s not all, newspapers are dying, the yellow pages are dead, maps are being replaced with GPS, magazines are going bye-bye, television is slowly but surely losing ground to steaming media and traditional radio is not going to be around for much longer with things like Pandora.

Sure, new opportunities arise but I doubt that they’ll ever generate the labor numbers needed. I guess that is what technology is supposed to do though, make things easier and cheaper by eliminating manual labor. When all labor is eliminated will we all live lives of luxury and leisure or will it just exacerbate the difference between the haves and have-nots?

Well, whatever the outcome, I for one am going to welcome our new robot masters.

Link: Technology has been used in this story to catch a cat burglar…who is a cat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDX7tevXO1E&feature=player_embedded