I just saw the news about LoweBot. A touch screen on wheels basically you can ask for where things are and it will take you to the item. I think it's pretty cool. It also does inventory.
With all the news lately of automation, it gets me thinking how this world is going to be strange in the future. Robots rolling around in stores, drones delivering pizza and other items, self-driving cars, self-driving taxis, self-driving semis.
No more jobs for people I guess lol. Even computers at some point will program themselves. We'll have robots that paint and does sculptures. I think it's very exciting, cool but scary at the same time.
There's the idea of basic income. I think automation is cool, it frees people up to do more of their passions and hobbyists. But in other ways, I wonder if this future utopia will scale. would people get bored and commit more crimes? or would not worrying about money lower crime to near zero?
Would people travel all the time? Maybe not as that'd probably cost more than staying in one place so they'd have to still save up or earn some money working something they enjoy or good at like maintaining machines? But then at some point, they'd be maintenance bots too, and manufacturing bots to make more bots... What about fitness? Would people be couch potatoes like in WALL-E?
The human race would then be able to be at its peak of creative, enjoyment and freedom. Would people become dumber if they are required to do less? Would people have more children than they'd have if they were required to work?
Then I also wonder about liabilities for all this automated stuff. We're going to have a bunch of machines living alongside them, so I'd hope they be tested a lot more than some regular website. Preferably automated repeatable unit tests. But if the computers learn to generate code at some point when AI is so good, then we have to worry about terminator happening and wiping out the human race.
How do you vision the future would be when machines are living aside us humans doing a lot of work we'd used to do manually? It seems exciting but a whole new set of problems as a con, but new possibilities and freedoms as a pro.
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