Dec 7, 2015
Life in the Robot Age: When We’re All Unemployed
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: futurism, robotics/AI
“You’ll never get a good job, son, if you’re smoking pot all the time!”
That’s a scolding you won’t hear in the future. Besides the fact that pot smokers can become president, the future will not require you to get a good job. The traditional motivation to keep your mind orderly and bourgeois will be gone, so let your mind fly its freak flag and wander the Technicolor pathways already cleared by St. John of Patmos, Salvador Dali, and Carl Sagan.
In the near future, we may all be unemployed. We are entering what is generally called the “second machine age.” And, optimistically speaking, it may become the best thing that ever happened to the human being.
But it’s been a fruitful search: multiple drug candidates, many already on the market for immune or psychiatric disorders, have consistently delayed age-associated diseases and stretched the lifespan of fruit flies, roundworms and mice. Yet human trials have been far beyond reach — without the FDA acknowledging “aging” as a legitimate target for drug development, researchers have had no way of pitching clinical trials to the regulatory agency.
