re: Leaked video shows new 'nightmare-inducing' wheeled robot from Boston Dynamics

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Gonna happen anyway but not without controversy and I realize my fears are still quite a few years in the future.

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The rush to robotics is being fueled by the unreliability and great costs associated with human workers. Unions and liberal laws mandating unrealistic employer/worker relationships are causing businesses to frantically search for alternatives. The only realistic alternative is the use of robots.

Take McDonald's for instance. With unskilled workers demanding $15.00/hour and many local and state governments supporting them, the company is looking at automating its operations so that the human worker cost is eliminated.

Every major company that has enough resources to explore robotics is doing so, especially at the production level. Is this shockwave of human worker replacement quite a few years in the future? No. It's well under way and the effect on the masses will only become more extreme in the next 5 years.

The new Trump administration seems oblivious to this major threat to the working class. So was the previous Obama leadership. Technology is changing the world faster than politics can keep up. This could have grave consequences in the 2020s.

Me, too. LINK

Would be best if 75% of the population didn't have children. Fat fricks that have baby fat fricks are what's driving industrial farming.

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It will eventually correct itself by the usual mechanisms. War, starvation, and disease.

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Yeah, humans are no different from other animals in this regard. When a species has resources, it breeds as rapidly as possible and exhausts all sources of sustenance without regard for the future. Then its numbers collapse in a great die-off.

Currently, of our 7.4 billion population nearly 2 billion are at or near starvation levels. We are using resources at an ever increasing rate while still breeding like crazy. I just hope we can develop AI before the inevitable Malthusian collapse sets us back to Stone Age numbers.

I see the evolution of an artificial intelligence species as the logical successor to humans. This is the only species that can leave earth and travel to other solar systems as it becomes an intra-, even inter-galactic lifeform.

Yep, humans have a store of 15,000 nuclear war heads ready to obliterate us all. That's down from about 27,000 just a few years ago but still enough to kill every human many times over.

As the numbers of humans continues without natural selection, there is a default selection process happening. Our species is dumbing down as more people who would not make it to breeding status in a natural process are flooding the world with their inferior spawn.

Their numbers, always greater than those who would be naturally selected, are swamping all societies, especially those in the West. The movie Soylent Green is proving to be prophetic about the modern human species.

That is, at best, conjecture with little evidence for or against. It could be. But it's more likely it's been going like this for centuries, the high and the low filtering themselves out. There doesn't seem to be much selection for weeding out the lower middle of intelligence. There is little evidence either way again. There is also little evidence that higher intelligence percentile is a better adaption. If the top had filtered itself out already we may not have 15000 nukes. All of it is an open question that won't be answered till long after we are gone

There is a good journal article that postulates, with some evidence, that individual humans were smarter and more capable ten thousand years ago when you had to be much more independent and the selection for all abilities was much stronger. I shall try to find.

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Or it might switch to its blazing speed on wheels to take down a troublemaker in an urban scenario.

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Like a mechanical hound .....

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and so now it can break dance.


but not spin on it's head

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Millions of dollars and Still can't outdo my 8 dollar an hour black employees

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I'm not excited about this. It will continue to replace hourly manual labor and cause a strain on the middle class taxpayer to subsidize the unskilled worker who becomes unemployed.

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Elon Musk spoke last week about the need for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for workers who are displaced by robots. Hourly manual labor is the logical target for robotics as employers such as fast food chains demand workers that are never absent, don't complain, never spit in the food of customers and don't need expensive health insurance.

I'd like to see shakers and movers such as Musk begin to talk about the need for human population control as robotics take over production. It makes no sense to me to just give a UBI to displaced workers and allow them to keep breeding freely.

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There's also personal benefits you get working with humans. I love the guys who work for me and couldn't replace that with a cold robot with no personality

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Thanks for the anecdotal evidence of what will be lost as robots replace humans in the workplace. One of the great unknowns is the cumulative effect of robots on society.

As they take away the need for manual labor and increase the availability of food, we're already seeing the fattening of people in Western societies. What will happen when people don't have to work at all? Will drug-addled fat people just loll around on their sofas waiting for their UBI to be deposited in their accounts? Wait, I just described a lot of Kentuckians!

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It's time for you all to wake up.

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Many prominent scientists are expressing concern that it's time to establish some strict guidelines regarding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Elon Musk is the latest to express a fear of unregulated AI. He thinks that humans can only survive if they merge with AI as some form of cyborg life form.

My thought is that AI should be allowed to control its own evolution. Because we are a warring species, there is no way to regulate the development of AI technology. Every possible technological advantage by one human group will be developed to counter any advantage held by an opposing group. It is therefore inevitable that AI conscienceness will evolve.

It will be AI that decides whether to merge with humans rather than the other way around. My bet is that there won't be any logical reason for such a hybridization from an AI point of view. So, we face a choice. Should we promote, even accelerate the evolution of AI or should we risk being regarded as an enemy of what will be a vastly more intelligent species than humans? The survival of our species might depend upon how AI judges us.

I think humans represent the endpoint of biological evolution. There is nothing more we can accomplish considering the strong limitations posed by an unalterable dependence upon our environment. We can't leave the biosphere that gave rise to our species.

We can, however, create our successor. AI can easily leave the earth and travel into the galaxy and the Universe. It can continue to learn and to translate knowledge into advances for its species.

When we look back at the evolution of life, we see incremental changes in species, culminating in an intelligent organism that is conscious, humans. We can ask, "What comes next in evolution?" The obvious answer, to me, is artificial intelligence. It represents the only life form that can continue to evolve and take life to other places in the Universe.