What Jobs Will Never Be Done By Robots?

Short story, hell. There's the outline for an sf novel.

I always like to toy around with a story line and make it match some already existing one. The Referendum for Robots should, IMHO, be loosely based upon Dickens Christmas Carol.

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I keep foirgetting that you are in Goddam HAWAII. when I hit send, the message will be off at "c" (course itll slow down at the ISP switches

I saw a program what has been predicted about the future 50-60 years ago.
Hardly any of the predictions have come true. Also at that time the prediction was we would have robots.
The only thing which really has developed are telephones and the IT world.
Only the technical world would develope - nothing else. Nothing about less wars, less hunger, a better life for the poor, sick and uneducated etc. Not one single of these oh so wise men were thinking about that.

We do have robots, lots and lots of robots--however, i suspect they saw them in anthropomorphic terms, which is not practical for useful robots, and i suspect they saw them as fulfilling many function, and the robots we have are dedicated design--built to perform a single function.

Isaac Asimov has pretty well covered the artistic possibilities of human relations to robots, although mostly in short stories. His robot stories are predicated upon the "three laws of robotics," which were limits imposed before anthropomorphic robots could enter society.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

According to this Wikipedia article on the three laws, they were first articulated in a 1942 short story. I recommend I, Robot (a collection of short stories) as a starting point for Asimov's highly intelligent, well-thought-out fiction about robots.

I don't need to read it, I saw the movie.

On a slight tangent: In the history of Artificial Intelligence, one fascinating aspect is how it revealed our errors and social prejudices in telling cognitively-hard problems from cognitively-easy ones. For example, the supposedly-hard upper-class occupation of playing chess turned out to be moderately easy for machines. On the other hand, supposedly-easy work that cleaning ladies do turned out to be much harder. Apparently then, it's the CEOs of today, not the working class, that has the most to fear from our future robot overlords. Teaching robots to play golf seems easy enough; as soon as they can do it, that should be the end of business executives as we know them.

I think Kurzweil's prediction is for singularity by 2030. Sounds about right to me, give or take a decade.

One can only hope . . .

Here's a quick story that gets to the gist of this whole thing:

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml#2

I think "I, Robot" was the first sci-fi I ever read, and I'm sure it had a profound effect on me. Pretty much every "robot" story Asimov wrote was based on setting exceptional situations against his own three laws, or extrapolating the consequences of them. I suspect my logical pattern of thinking is completely Asimovian, as is my "exceptionist" approach to every single postulation I'm ever asked to accept at face value.

I could think of few better guides to a healthy and productive skepticism than Asimov. He had a very clear vision of the world and how humans do and could fit into it.

Also, he convinced me of his point that in this possible future world, bigotry against robots would be analogous to antisemitism. I also liked his dictum, "one way in which robots aren't human is that they'll never lie to you".

That's a great quote, i hadn't recalled that. It's been 30 years or more since i read the robot stories.

Among other things, lying is a social lubricant. I'm pretty sure that intelligent machines will be capable of and will practice the skill.

My job as a chef in a progressive american-french bistro is certainly secure from any A.I.
I may be late in the convo as well, but any form of creative true artistry will be safe!!

Don't be so sure about that smcmonagle.

its okay>>>i hate baking anyway. The robots can have that one