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When Machines Can Do Most Jobs—Passion, Creativity, and Reinvention Rule

Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.

Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15–20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.

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AI and robotics researchers call for global ban on autonomous weapons

More than 1,000 leading artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics researchers and others, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, just signed and published an open letter from the Future of Life Institute (FLI) today calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons.

FLI defines “autonomous weapons” as those that select and engage targets without human intervention, such as armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions.

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Sci-Fi: L5 episode 1 [720p]

The crew aboard the spaceship Argo has just awoken from hypersleep to a nightmare. Having spent the last twenty years searching for a new home to salvage humanity from a dying earth they return home and find something has gone terribly wrong. They have been mysteriously impelled 200 years into the future and find not a trace of any human life. The Argo’s Commander, Dr. Richard Adams is determined to find some answers and, aided by the ship’s surgeon, Rod Lewis, and onboard Artificial Intelligence, Clarke, decides to explore the one clue to the massive floating O’Neill colony named L5. After an exploratory skiff goes missing inside the colony, Adams and Lewis venture inside themselves to find the answers they seek, nothing can prepare them for what they are about to find.

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