Worried about robots taking over

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It worries me too. I don't want to be homeless. I'd rather be dead.

Somebody reassure me.

What you all aren't considering is that humanity will not stand for a bleak standard of living. There will be revolution and rebellion if capitalism still exists and it gets more and more unbalanced because there are no jobs. If robots do indeed take over that many jobs it's just helping the inevitable push towards the restructuring of society, (a much needed one as far as I'm concerned), where having a job (in the complete sense that we have of it now), will not be necessary. Come on people, haven't you ever watched Star Trek?

No, I have never watched Star Trek.

Ok, ignore Star Trek. And I guess maybe this isn't going to help short-term issues, but think about how society's structure has changed over time. Just in the last few years countries most of us live in have adopted things like welfare, social security, things like that. The dark ages is long past, feudalism is not in effect anymore. Those are social reforms that keep people who cannot or who otherwise don't work, alive. The only way for society to keep functioning at all if robots take over a huge number of jobs is for there to be serious government intervention into finding work or otherwise financially supporting people who don't have jobs, or people will revolt and make social change happen. That's what I think about it anyways.

Well it'd be common UK citizens who will suffer the most, because not only jobs are scarce for the British people because of so many EU people and Syrian refugees being put first before us, there'll also be robots taking the jobs, so what little amount of employment there will be left will be given to foreign people.

I have nothing against foreign people, but I think British people should be put first, being so this is Britain.

I don't have such optimism in our NT cousins and how they will handle the social fallout. When things go bad the herd culls itself-- it'll either cut off the head (assassination) or lose fat in the rear (genocide of the lower status). If the head has the robots and thus the power the herd will commit genocide on the bottom.

Chances are though it will be a slow drawn out process of incremental change towards dystopia, this allows the head to convince the middle that they're special: we only cull the weak, after all, so you're safe-- until a generation later when your kids are considered the weak. You have to understand most people have really short memories, and attention span as a whole is currently in decline, so I don't think it would be that hard to pull off for the power brokers-- they merely need to be patient.

That's why I'm a firm believer in do-it-yourself. If you know how to do all the things you need to do to survive (create food, find/build shelter, and know how to collect water), then the threat is minimized. The game becomes mere avoidance of those in power. The entire "system" is built on making people reliant on it-- like a drug. Without the system most people would perish because the system doesn't teach you how to be "self-reliant" as the education system claims, it only teaches you how to work within the system itself (which is the exact opposite of self-reliant).

just wait 'til cruz the ooze gets into the white house. with a conservative majority in all 3 branches, some kind of feudalism will drop back in sooner rather than later.

I think this is a very serious concern. The VSauce video posted above includes a link to a far more interesting video by CGPGrey, "Humans Need Not Apply"

... and it does nothing to argue against its points. I think the CGPGrey video does a great job of explaining why this time is different from technological progress in the past.

I'll take that bet! I think you are both vastly underestimating AI and overestimating the effectiveness of human workers. Remember that a robot doesn't have to be better than the best human worker to replace the average human worker. In fact, it doesn't even have to be better than the average human worker before its lower cost makes it better value. (Having said that, I do think robots will quickly become better than people at most jobs, because most people are, frankly, pretty bad at their jobs!)

As did Asimov, although he usually saw it as a fallacy that would eventually play itself out.

Side note:

Did anyone else read "1.3m robots" from the original post and think it meant, "1.3 meter (tall) robots"...or was it just me? I mean, 1.3 meter robots would be kinda cute and a really good way to market them so no one suspects they are just a way of stealing all the jobs...

Okay. Probably just me.

No, I did, too!

^^^^mee three! [at first glance]

This is an interesting subject, I remember a while ago reading about it and watching a few videos like "humans need no apply" and thinking that it was somewhat concerning. In the short run I don't see any big problems, mostly it seems that the first change with be autonomous vehicles replacing taxi and semi drivers. People always adapt, computers, industrialization, etc, have all been disruptive to humanity but it adapted.

People like Elan Musk are concerned more so with the development of rampant AIs mostly I think, which would definitely be a problem. He wants to keep AI development in line with something that is helpful to humanity, rather than say something designed to kill off enemies going awry, which imo doesn't sound too far off from skynet. AI is rather stupid right now, but it's getting better, and imagine a point 100 years from now where it is intelligent enough to improve upon itself.

sooo, I guess you can look at it different ways, and you really won't know exactly what will happen till it does happen.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/elon-musk-ai-safety/