There has been discussion if artificial intelligence (AI) will be a threat for the mankind or not. For example Bill Gates, Elon Musk are worried. On the other hand Eric Horvitz thinks that AI will not pose a threat to humans. I am sure that development of technology will continue. It is hard to predict how AI and other technology will evolve in longer term and even harder to see what it will mean for us, for our work and so. Here is one good article describing why it is so difficult to predict.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a movie published in 2001 and pretty good example about predicting the future. The movie tell a story about a super intelligent robot that looks like a children, acts like a children and wants to be a real children. This happens late of 21st century. There are many human like robots and police has means to detect who is a robot and who is a real human. At the end of the movie humans are disappeared from the earth and robots have different kind of shape and means of transportation. I remember when first time watching the movie in 2001 it was easy to see one thing that has already changed. However the movie can still be a good prediction about the future with AI, or the future may be totally different. It is very hard to say if artificial intelligence will some day be smarter than humans when all aspects of life and science is taken into account.
If we consider only limited tasks we already see that AI is better than the best human in the world. Easy examples are for example computer playing chess, systems controlling production in a factory, mobile phone that can read a map and guide you to the destination anywhere in the world (replaces maps), an automatic digital telephone center, robots are buying and selling listed shares, and so on. In some cases humans could also to the tasks but AI or computers are much more cost effective. There is plenty of examples how automation, computers or artificial intelligence has replaced humans or are doing that in near future.
So it is a good question if AI will threat the whole mankind. Before we know the answer to that we have to think what AI and robotization will mean for the distribution of income. In many cases it will be only positive thing when robots can take care of dangerous and boring tasks and we can concentrate on more interesting work and having fun. People can have fun if they get enough money for food, housing and entertainment. The big question is how to get the money if there will be jobs only for robots and small part of the people?
Owners the robots will make some money for sure. They will also need to hire some people to develop and build the robots and keeping those up and running. Robots will make cut costs down. For example travelling could be cheaper thanks to mobile phone applications that will make it possible easily ask who wants to offer lowest cost accommodation or taxi service for you. No need to pay big money needed for the salaries of the people working in hotel companies. Instead you could find someone who offers a room and sightseeing free for you because he or she just loves to meet foreigner people.
The interesting thing is to predict which jobs will be next replaced by robots. My favorite bet is social media influencers. For example in Twitter you can easily see different kind of lists of the top influencers and different kind of studies how to effectively use social media. You need to make your posts at certain time of the day. You should be active. You should retweet to thank people who mentions you in their tweets. You should have a picture in your tweet. You can get more followers if you follow other people. You should not spam. Many simple rules that can be taken care by a computer software or robot. Even writing 140 characters of good enough English is not impossible for a robot. Using other social media services to share things published in the net is not much more difficult even if the postings can be longer than 140 characters. I don't know if it is legal to make a social media account and let a robot use it. I don't know how effectively the social media companies are fighting against robots. Will it be possible that some day artificial social media influencers made by some digital marketing company will be ranked high in the top influencers lists? If yes, will the marketing company sell low cost licences to interested companies and enable big cost savings in marketing?
Another interesting area for robots are law offices. It will not be easy to replace lawyers by robots, but I think robots can easily help a lot. Only thing needed is a robot that can read and search law texts. One example was shown in a Swedish TV series Hubots - Real Humans.
When robots will be able to read and write English text, media companies will be able to use robots to draft news and newspaper articles. Journalists in Finland does not need be worried because Finnish is small and difficult language and it will take longer time before robots will be able to do that properly.
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