Slashdot | Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?: "I will make this prediction: by 2008, every meal in every fast food restaurant will be ordered from a kiosk like this, or from a similar system embedded in each table.

Yeah, I'm going to go with a no on this one. Everyone said the same thing when ATMs came around, 'Oh no, they're going to replace actual tellers!' But it didn't, banks still hire quite frequently for bank tellers."

Average number of Neurons in the human brain (excluding the cerebellum): 20.000.0000.0000
- Average number of connections per neuron: 1.000
Each neuron can perform about 200 calculations per second, per connexion.

So, we have 20.000.0000.0000 X 1.000 X 200 = 4.000 TeraOps

Think of all the cool personal service jobs that will be available in the robo-industrialists' homes. They have to have a way to spend all those robo-trillions in a way that shows their friends that they are HYPER-rich.

Reminds me of a book Player Piano [rosettabooks.com] by Kurt Vonnegut. It's a story about an America where machines control everything, and engineers and managers who design the machines are at the top of society. Most people either have to join the army or the Wreaks N' Wrecks (menial labor for little pay). Everybody's standards of living are high because the machines produce everthing they need, but everybody is miserable because they don't feel they have a purpose

The electronics Industry is so automated that the total world supply of CPU's is made by less than a thousand persons and that number drops every day

its quite amazing how we have coped for many hundreds of years, yet, in the next 20, we'll go belly-up.


We need to consider the possibility of symbiosis (sp?), or mutually beneficial pairing of humans and machines in order to survive this crisis. We can't get rid of machines, so we must incorporate them in our minds and bodies to keep from being overwhelmed by them

In a highly automated society it makes sense to have a high quality of life even for the unemployed (gasp! socialist!), which implies a decent social welfare system. It's either that, or concentrate the power of the economy in the hands of a few people, and write off the rest of the population as superfluous