Some serious thoughts for this week

Now that you had your 5 second giggles with all the other posts,
here's something different.

The following scenario is inevitable,
even though we can't predict when exactly it will take place.

Personally I hope it will come as soon as within the next 100 years if not sooner.
This subject has been most likely studied in some way or another, but I am not aware of what it's called, so I'll just name it the "wake up call".

This "wake up call" will happen once technology has reached a critical point,
where human labor is no longer required in supplying us our 3 basic needs:

1. Food production
2. Shelter (production and maintenance, including infrastructure)
3. Health care services

Once these three needs are taken care of by machines, nanobots and A.I.,
the world will be 99% unemployed.
This is when society will have to ask big questions:

What is a life worth?
How do we measure and justify it?
What is money for anymore?

A lot will happen in a 100 years, so this is pretty heavy speculation about a utopian future,
but these are valid questions to be asked already.



In my opinion it all boils down to the need of our primitive male ego for genetic supremacy and materialistic domination, where money is simply a clever tool, protected by complex bureaucracy, to control and manipulate the weak and stupid, and eventually prevent them from reproducing at their full potential.
Money today is what brute force used to be in the stone age.

Any thoughts on this or should we all just shut up, get back to our mediocre lives,
grab a beer, play some games and watch porn till someone throws us six feet under?

Technology Singularity in 2050.

Moore's Law coupled with Exponential Growth = Nanites replacing your brain cells in 2050, 3D Printing at an Atomic level, FTL travel. Life Expectancy of 300+ years.

But then again, we cant predict the next 6 years correctly, let alone the next 36.

"

Quantume wrote:

Any thoughts on this or should we all just shut up, get back to our mediocre lives, grab a beer, play some games and watch porn till someone throws us six feet under?

Well, I can only speak for myself, but yes.

I'm still waiting for the damn jet packs and flying cars... until I see those the rest is just bunk.

Observation One:

Computers server one purpose - to automate known tasks over and over again. Sometimes this is based on input, or conditionals - but at the very basics it automates. A computer is limited to what we know collectively as humans. If there is a conditional that it doesn't know, or if there is a conditional that is incorrect it doesn't know how to work around that. Even with extremely complicated learning A.I. this is limited.

Observation Two:

Humans are defined as a species by curiosity. It's what makes us the superior mammal. For example, take an infant. An infant comes into this world not knowing really anything. It doesn't have an instinctual survival, it has a trail-and-error survival. Even the first breath an infant takes is that of survival, an infant needs to work extremely hard to figure out why he isn't getting the needed resources that he was able to live with while in his mother's womb - and then he takes his first breath. From that point on, the lifestyle of discovery and curiosity defines his life - wanting to continue to learn about the world that's around him - figuring out how to talk, what words mean, using those words to eventually create sentences, how to walk, how to talk, learning abstracts such as arithmetic, etc etc. Unlike hooved mammals that instinctively know a good amount of their survival skills at birth - humans are stupid - which gives us the capacity to adopt a far superior way of learning and eventually surviving.

Result

Regardless of how technology evolves, humans will always be the gatekeeper of it. If computers are limited to knowing that the earth is flat, when it's really round - until we've found this discovery - even with the help of such technology - it will always make it's calculations off of what it knew - that the earth was flat.

While the meaningless, monotonous tasks that we do everyday may be automated - there will still be a need for discovery - to push such technology further and further. We've barely reached out past our own planet and there's still so much we don't know about the planet we do inhabit. It will be a very, very long time - if ever that the curious, knowledge-driven human has to worry about defining his existance's worth.

That said, those that do perform these meaningless, or monotonous tasks day-in and day-out - they should already be questioning their worth. As only those that truly push the human race forward will be the victors of darwanism.