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By 2040, cabs will be driven by Google robots, shops will become showrooms for online outlets and call centres will be staffed by intelligent droids. That’s the scenario depicted in recent research which suggests robots could be taking over our lives and jobs in less than 30 years. The competition for work caused by a rise in the robots population will see us heading to surgeons for ‘additional processing power for our brains’, they claim. We may also be requesting bionic implants for our hands that will make us able to perform tasks as fast as any machine.

Big changes are coming to the labor market that people and governments aren't prepared for, Bill Gates believes.Speaking at Washington, D.C., economic think tank The American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Gates said that within 20 years, a lot of jobs will go away, replaced by software automation ("bots" in tech slang, though Gates used the term "software substitution").This is what he said:"Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses … it's progressing. ...  Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. ...  20 years from now, labor demand for lots...

Mobile robots and "smart" computers are threatening to replace up to half the U.S. workforce within the next decade or two, according to a Bloomberg report. The report cites an Oxford University study that identified more than 700 occupations at risk of computer automation. Here are the jobs that are most at risk, based on the study.

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun. ........................................................... The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is...

Now that Robert Park is in the winter of his life and James Van Allen is dead, an unlikely person named Charles Seife, not a scientist but rather a professor of journalism, has taken up the banner of the jihad to destroy NASA's human spaceflight program. In an article in Slate and a later post on his personal blog, Professor Seife compared the space agency to a Panda, cute but in danger of extinction. The reason, he suggests, NASA's "fixation" on human space flight. Like Van Allen, Park, and a slew of politicians before him, Seife would see NASA's human...

The US Army is considering replacing thousands of soldiers with robots as it deals with sweeping troop cuts. A senior American officer has said he is considering shrinking the size of the Army’s brigade combat teams by a quarter and replacing the lost troops with robots and remote-controlled vehicles. The American military is still far from fielding armies of Terminator-type robotic killers, though. Ideas under discussion instead include proposals to see manned trucks and transporters replaced by supply trains of robot vehicles. Generals are studying proposals as the US Army is to slim down from 540,000 to about 490,000 soldiers...

Obama to speak on the NSA surveillance scandal from the Justice Department around 11 a.m. EST today.C-SPAN's description:The President delivers remarks at the Department of Justice presenting the outcomes of the Administration's review of U.S. signals intelligence programs. He is expected to focus on steps that increase oversight and transparency while leaving the framework of the surveillance programs in place. In addition, according to officials, the President will turn to Congress for guidance regarding the future of NSA data collection. The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies recommended more than 40 suggested changes at the NSA in a...

A Silicon Valley startup is poised to replace the everyday security guard with high tech robots the company plans to introduce to the world on Thursday. The 300 pound R5 Autonomous Data Machine looks like a hybrid of R2-D2 and the robot from Lost in Space. More than just yelling ‘danger,’ manufacturer Knightscope hopes the machines will actually help predict crimes and even cut current rates in half. And its inventors say it was a recent school shooting that actually inspired them to create the R5....

Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, creator of the BigDog, CHEETAH, and PETMAN robots, according the the New York Times. The purchase is Google’s latest investment in advanced robotics — a new priority for the search company and one that it has recently added to its list of “moonshot” initiatives. Boston Dynamics represents a new type of acquisition for Google. It is best known for projects that were carried out under military contracts, such as the tottering BigDog robot, a demonstration of which went viral in BigDog’s development was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part...

Momentum Machines robot enables a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices. It does everything employees can do except better: * it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible. * their next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem. * Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in...

We worry about robots. Hardly a day goes by where we're not reminded about how robots are taking our jobs and hollowing out the middle class. The worry is so acute that economists are busy devising new social contracts to cope with a potentially enormous class of obsolete humans. Documentarian James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, is worried about robots too. Only he's not worried about them taking our jobs. He's worried about them exterminating the human race. I'll repeat that: In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how...

After you heard President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots? But just in case the question didn’t occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee’s announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili’s already made this move earlier this year. With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay...

The future doesn't always arrive with a gasp and a boom like Skynet inTerminator. No, sometimes it's more like Office Space. At least that's the idea I get watching this video of the Marines' testing the Legged Squad Support System. DARPA built the LS3 to act as an autonomous pack horse that "can carry 400 lbs of a squad’s load, follow squad members through rugged terrain and interact with troops in a natural way, similar to a trained animal and its handler." And yet, in the hands of real Marines, it sounds like they're testing a new network printer out,...

<p>What are human workers going to do when super-intelligent robots and computers are better than us at doing everything? That is one of the questions that a new study by Dr. Carl Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne of Oxford University sought to address, and what they concluded was that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs could be automated within the next 20 years. Considering the fact that the percentage of the U.S. population that is employed is already far lower than it was a decade ago, it is frightening to think that tens of millions more jobs could disappear due to technological advances over the next couple of decades. I have written extensively about how we are already losing millions of jobs to super cheap labor on the other side of the globe. What are middle class families going to do as technology also takes away huge numbers of our jobs at an ever increasing pace? We live during a period of history when knowledge is increasing an an exponential rate. In the past, when human workers were displaced by technology it also created new kinds of jobs that the world had never seen before. But what happens when the day arrives when computers and robots can do almost everything more cheaply and more efficiently than humans can?</p>

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)A new worker's revolution is rising in China and it doesn't involve humans. With soaring wages and an aging population, electronics factory managers say the day is approaching when robotic workers will replace people on the Chinese factory floor. A new wave of industrial robots is in development, ranging from high-end humanoid machines with vision, touch and even learning capabilities, to low-cost robots vying to undercut China's minimum wage....

Medieval doctors bled their patients with leeches. Far from improving their condition, it left them worse off. Raising the wages of fast-food workers to $15 an hour would produce similar results for those the proposal is intended to help. In America, minimum-wage workers are better paid than the average worker in Mexico. Why? It’s not because U.S. employers are more generous than their Mexican counterparts. Nor do Americans somehow deserve better pay. American minimum-wage earners make more because they produce more. Better education and greater capital investment make American workers more productive, raising their earnings. Competition forces businesses to pay...

Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people. A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades. The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services,...

They are an improbable group of superheroes. But some of Britain's greatest minds have got together to focus their powers on saving humanity from itself. Led by the Astronomer Royal and Cambridge don Martin Rees, famous thinkers such as physicist Stephen Hawking and former Government chief scientist Robert May have formed a society to draw up a doomsday list of risks that could wipe out mankind. From crippling cyber-attacks by terrorists using the internet to cause havoc, to the release of engineered diseases and killer computers, they warn the future is far from rosy.But the work being done by the...

Is the debate about giving citizenships to millions of illegal immigrants becoming irrelevant as technology begins to replace the need for today’s human labor required in planting and picking field crops?