-— The problem today is that cybernetics are eroding away the jobs requiring intellectual power, starting at the lower levels and more and more rapidly working their way up.-—
Have you tried asking Siri a question? Computers are still pretty stupid.
And despite what the futurists say, thinking is a primarily spiritual activity, so computers will never be able to truly think.
But it’s impossible for us to know the upper limit of human mimicry that machines or biologil/mechanical hybrids are capable of.
I really, really hope I’m wrong.
But I don’t see a way most humans can remain economically productive in the long run.
Which means we need to develop some other way to provide meaning to people’s lives.
“Stuff” won’t be a problem. The cybernetic economy will be immensely productive.
But on what basis is that stuff distributed if the extent to which you contribute is no longer a factor? Is there any way to run such a world other than by a massive government redistributing stuff from the very few (human) producers to the vast majority of consumers?
Yes, they are. However, the rate at which they are improving is amazing.
About 20 years ago I researched voice recognition for the company I worked with. State of the art was Dragon Naturally Speaking. You had to spend hours training it to recognize your voice, and then it worked MUCH better for some people than others.
One of the women in my office could get it to function at above 98%. I could only get it to about 90% at best. Which sounds pretty good, but your spend about the same amount of time locating and correcting the errors as you would just typing it in.
My present Android came with voice recognition built in. It's way over 99% efficient. Even usually inserts commas and periods correctly, and capitalizes names, even when they are also common nouns.
The advancement is truly amazing.
The major issue, however, is that computer tech advance is not linear, it's exponential. If we had that big an advance in 20 years, what will the next 20 bring?