From the NY Times: The robots are coming! Word is they want
your job, your life and probably your little dog, too.
Robots have once again gripped the nation’s imagination,
stoking fears of displaced jobs and perhaps even a displaced human race. An
alarmist segment on “60 Minutes” was only the most vivid of a recent series of
pieces in respected magazines and news outlets warning about widespread worker
displacement. Professors at Cambridge University and a co-founder of Skype are
creating a new Center for the Study of Existential Risk, which would research a
“Terminator”-like scenario in which supercomputers rise up and destroy their
human overlords, presumably plotting the whole caper in zeros and ones….
Such android anxiety has a long history. John Maynard Keynes
wrote about “technological unemployment” during the Great Depression. In the
Industrial Revolution, disgruntled laborers — including the original Luddites —
smashed automated looms and threshing machines that “stole” their jobs. In the
15th century, scribes protested the printing press, with a futile zeal rivaled
perhaps only by that of modern journalists…. There is something almost Freudian in these robot takeover
terrors, which foretell that the technology we fathered will rise up against
us, rendering us obsolete or even extinct….
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