Bring on the ‘bots, I say

I read with interest the Site Insight section of your mag from issue 66, particularly the ‘Will Robots Take My Job?’ entry. As a sports teacher at a high school, I’m hoping to remain in the ‘no’ category for some years to come (currently at 8.5% risk of being replaced by a bot), but it did get me thinking about the future of the human race. Rather out of my realm of expertise, I know!

I listened to an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast recently where his guests (Sam Harris and Dan Harris) were talking about the rise of AI and robots. They discussed how this could be both good and bad for the future of our species — bad in that some jobs will no longer be performed by humans, but good because that would give humans more time to focus on more ‘human’ tasks, like being creative and raising their children (so long as there was some sort of universal wages scheme introduced to keep everyone alive, which is a topic for another day). The conversation was very stimulating, and made me wonder... if AI and robots did eventually develop to a stage where humans would be free to pretty much just focus on their hobbies and enriching their own lives and reproducing, leaving the menial tasks to machines, what is the point of the human race?

We’d essentially become freeloaders, leaving all the thinking and meaningful ‘doing’ to robots. It would be like a permanent holiday for the whole species! Apart from perhaps the entertainment and sporting businesses (although, I will admit, watching a robot rugby game would be quite something), what will humans actually do with themselves if we’re not working? The future really is full of uncertainty, isn’t it? [ ED SKILLICORN ]