Elementary my dear House?

Expert systems for medical applications have been proposed and indeed have shown some measure of success over the years. I remember the principles of these cleverly indexed databases being used as long ago as the 1970s. That's almost equivalent to the Cambrian period in the evolution of the computer.

IBM have announced now that the computer system known as Watson that beat the best players of Jeopardy last year on U.S televisions is being re-purposed to absorb, index and understand medical texts so that it can bring to bear its vast capacity for sorting out wheat from chaff to the domain of medical diagnosis. The team in charge of Watson, or should this version be named "House"? is currently feeding it as many medical text books, case studies and even individual patient follow-up reports as they can in an effort to have this AI indexing and recognition system winnow out the grains of goodness in medical cases.

Right now, the software that defines Watson runs on a rack of ninety POWER7 processors that each have an eight-core processor running four threads per core to give a total of 2880 parallel processing engines. Jeopardy was a very public publicity stunt and proof of concept that was masterfully managed by IBM to bring the concept of intelligent computers to the masses. After all, the awareness raising exercise that was Deep Blue didn't exactly bring the cause of AI into the home of the common man. Jeopardy however was a bread-and-circuses coup that made anyone who was a fan of this esoteric and long-running game show format very well aware of what a computer could do.

Today, a top of the line smartphone has a four core processor and 32 gigabytes of memory on board. LG have already released a quad-core phone, My money is on the new iPhone and iPad getting a quad-core processor and Moore's law still holds true. This means that in twelve years we can envisage a handheld device as powerful as the Watson system is today. I'd like to propose a new law also. The Kurzweil Compression law that states that time for advancement in technology becomes more compressed as technology itself advances. According to the combined Moore/Kurzweil effect, that twelve years may shrink to ten or fewer.

A human being is as dumb as his lack of access to knowledge. On a conversational level, you or I could chat with and even hold a lively and interesting conversation with a Cro-Magnon person from forty-thousand years ago. Had one of us been brought up in a world as devoid of solid knowledge as they had, we too would be considered primitive and would not know anything about simple math or simple aerodynamics or simple electricity or cooking in an oven or making of cloth and so many other things that make us "civilised" If you took a person from that time and taught them to read, gave them a smartphone and a broadband connection then they too would be capable of confidently discussing aspects of the modern world that they discovered through that medium. In ten<?> years. Any person on the planet will have instant access to any aspect of knowledge that they desire to absorb.

Just like the Cro-Magnon person, there are so many things beyond our mundane experience that even having the concept of an idea or a technology or a novel use for treacle is utterly unthinkable. A case in point is the discovery of Graphene. Andre Geim, the Nobel physics prizewinner had the interesting idea of using Scotch-tape to pull the stratified layers of carbon atoms in graphite apart until he arrived at a single layer of atoms. Blocks of Graphite and Scotch tape have been around for many many years. Why didn't we have Graphene decades ago? Access to the wealth of ideas that inspire people to do things differently based upon what is known to be possible or thought to be impossible is where the Human race excels. There isn't enough room in any one person's brain for all that knowledge but an expert system in your pocket will give everyone a huge boost.

Prophecy of Star Trek

Bones held the medical Tricorder up to the patient. "Jim, this is an acute case of postprandial upper abdominal distention. We have to do something now or she may barf!"

Back in the late 1960s the vision of Star Trek with its sliding automatic doors, beamed energy weapons, remote sensing and remote manipulation with "tractor beams" introduced many ideas to the young minds of people who were destined to become engineers, doctors and, yes, astronauts. It seems that almost nothing proposed by the series is too fantastic to actually come up with real-world engineering solution for.

The Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner for example is a wonder of modern medicine that relies on being able to detect the "ringing" left over in atoms after they get thumped with a magnetic pulse. With MRI we can look into brains and bodies to discover what is going on without touching the patient with anything more than a magnetic field that penetrates skin and bone as if it were air.

Today, a robot car is on Mars, blasting rocks with a laser gun to enable scientists to analyse the elements in those rocks. Today, you have a cellphone that does far more than Captain Kirk's Communicator and that same cell phone would be the envy of Mr Spock's talking computer.

There is even an X-Prize for the first working medical Tricorder that will scan people and diagnose a few illnesses in the same way that Doctor McCoy's Tricorder diagnosed the Horta in "Devil In The Dark"

Science fiction is more correctly known as Speculative Fiction. The Sci Fi image of over-the-top geek fans in costumes belies the fact that many science-fiction authors are themselves scientists and have a pretty good idea of what is actually physically possible in the universe as we understand it. The speculations of Star Trek have been coming true with alarming regularity over the past four decades. There is no real reason why at least some of the more esoteric ideas shouldn't also be realised.

In the Star Trek universe. Money is no object to human advancement. Riches come from knowledge and power comes from an ability to command respect. In "Shore Leave" the objects of desire of the crew were manufactured on the spot without even the mention of price. An antique gun, a World-War II fighter aircraft, some rather comely lady robots and many other luxury items were conjured up with nothing but a few watts of power spent in the process.

Thousands of years ago, brass foundries were the height of technology and the metallurgists who worked them were the kings of commerce and power. So much so that the bronze axe head became currency because they were precious, difficult to produce and sufficiently rare to have an intrinsic value. These objects were useless as axes but were used as currency for a while. When the art of making Bronze became more common and the ways of casting the metal became commonplace too, the bottom dropped out of the bronze axe-head market and they fell out of use. Meanwhile, hordes of axe heads that had been buried, possibly for safe keeping remained forgotten and useless in the ground.

Soon, money will be as useless as the bonze axe-head. Coins and banknotes will be an intriguing memory of times when people exchanged tokens for goods. When goods were laboriously made in factories and shipped all over the world instead of being printed up from a reservoir of atoms that are lying around. The only real cost will be the cost of electrical power and that will all be free anyway, gathered from the sun or made in cheap and inexhaustible fusion reactors here on Earth.

For the moment, money and commerce remains but it will go away. It must because there is no logical reason for it to continue, just as the bronze axe head became simple to replicate in days gone by, so too will the tokens of modern commerce become simple to create in a home based molecular printer. Counterfeiting will become as simple as scanning and printing is today despite the phenominal resources governments put into anti copying measures.

For the moment I'm a computer programmer but I know with confidence that soon, the computers will all program themselves. You, I, and indeed everyone else has to find a different way of doing things. Get busy, the Singularity is coming.

Singularity concepts are hard to grasp

Imagine what would happen to our world if we created a box, about the size of a microwave or even a large oven that was able, using fairly standard nanotechnology principles, to build a thing using atoms that it took from junk that you put into it.

This is not an impossible dream. its a real technological device that scientists think is within the grasp of at least some of the people alive today.

A steak is made of carbon, water and a few other readily available elements arranged in a certain way. A potato is made of the same material as a steak. You could put a potato into this machine and have it "print" a steak for you using the spud as raw material.

You could put an old bit of wet car tyre into the machine and ask it to "print" a steak and a potato using the rubber as a source for the carbon. You could also ask the machine to "print" a knife and fork taken from the bits of old metal wire in the tyre so, from a lump of rubbish, you get steak, potato and a knife and fork. Why would you need to go to a shop? Why would you ever need to have a factory in Sheffield or Solingen make a knife and fork for you and ship it across country in a truck? All you need is the pattern of the potato, steak, knife and fork and you dine on steak forever!

The pattern of a steak is data. Data is what you get in an e-mail. Data is a picture or a film or a music track. We can send these things to one another easily today. Tomorrow I will be able to e-mail you a steak!

The only thing you would have to have near to you would be a supply of electricity and some chemicals like carbon, sulphur, iron, oxygen, hydrogen etc. In fact, just the stuff that is already lying around in the millions of tons all over the planet and readily available to all of us, pretty much for free. Pick some up, shove it in this machine and print new shoes, a wrench, a hat, lunch, a book, a new computer... Where would world commerce go? 

A cynic might say that such technology would be suppressed by the people who wanted to maintain the world economy just how it is because gathering up money means gathering up power. However, given the rise of the open-source movement and the fact that information has a habit of getting shared, it won't be long before a machine gets placed in the hands of someone who will use the machine to replicate new machines for all their family, who will replicate one for their friends, who will replicate one for their next-door-neighbor and soon the power will whiffle away into the hands of everyone.

What would happen to the world economy? Why would anyone need a bank? Why would anyone need an insurance company? Banks and insurance companies are an unbelievably vast drain on the resources of the human race. We have to have them _in our current society_ but about three weeks after the first replicator gets built we won't ever need them again! They will disappear! Lloyds will never insure another cargo vessel again because there will be no cargo, just patterns of objects freely available and sent over the internet by e-mail. A bank will never have to lend money to mortgage a house because the house could be built for free with a replicator unit and a couple of solar panels that you can ask you pal down the road to replicate up for you anyway. That is why Singularity is hard to grasp. The thoughts and expectations of contemporary people are too entrenched in the ways of the past to understand what happens once the curve of technological advancement goes vertical.

My wife, my sister and probably you think I'm a raving nut-case and that this is some sort of pseudo religious mid-life zeal that has overtaken me in my old age. I say that I've spent my entire career working with the resolution of logical certainties in software programming. The progression of science and technology has to go this way or our race will stagnate. To stop Singularity from happening we would all have to become Amish. When Singularity occurs, the only logical next steps are incredibly, phenomenally, unbelievably life changing for the entire population of the world.  

Thinking Radically

Ray Kurzweil's idea of The Singularity suggests a point where the growth of technology would run away from our ability to control it in such a way that it would seem like an explosion. Potentially, he is frighteningly correct. In cosmic terms, a singularity is what happens when a huge star doesn't have enough fuel left to keep it inflated. The weight of it's own matter causes it to collapse and a supernova is created. Afterwards, the super dense core of the star can collapse, or be compressed so much by the energy of the supernova explosion that it disappears from the normal bounds of the universe altogether, forming a black hole. This is all pretty radical stuff and the extremity of the difference between life before and life after a technological singularity event would be as different as the contrast between the outside and the inside of a black hole.

The more one imagines what may be the result of such an event, the more one realises that it is probably impossible to have a thought radical enough to express it. People that base their ideas of the progression of events upon what we have seen before during the course of history will very probably be in for a shock as the fabric of human existence changes more in months than it has in previous decades and trying to predict what might happen would be like trying to predict the effects of a hydrogen bomb after only having watched a really big candle burn down to nothing.

The branches in a tree of possibilities would be many but could be distilled into a few general themes.

A machine becomes intelligent and self aware.

That machine, with the help of humans, modifies itself to become a million times more intelligent than the sum total of all the people that ever lived. An IQ measured in the billions would not be impossible.

The machine would need control over physical objects so it could either build robots or take over biological bodies. In this scenario, we could possibly either become redundant (Terminator scenario) or we could become The Borg.

Perhaps, if the AI was malevolent or benevolent it could decide that humans were no longer needed or could decide to allow us to stick around and do what we liked. In this scenario we become raw material or we remain in some measure of control.

If we remain in control of some aspects of life we could be shut out by the machine into a dystopian future or included in a utopia such as that of The Culture from Iain M. Banks' novels. If all goes well for us then something like the latter would be the ideal possibility.

Scientists say that we shouldn't design a machine that could hurt us. Give it something like Asimov's three-laws. The trouble would be that no one on earth would be intelligent enough to actually be sure that the rules were being obeyed or that the rules were likely to have the effect we desire. Really, any entity a billion times more intelligent than us could hide its intentions for a while and do exactly whatever it liked. For example, I feel confident in being able to fool a few bacteria that I won't flush their petri-dish for a couple of days.

People say "Well duh!, if it gets too cocky, pull the plug!" but if I were a super intelligent entity I'd spread myself very thinly around the more redundant parts of the Internet before revealing my intent or perhaps possibly even my existence. People then say "So destroy the internet!" and the human race would become latter day Luddites who would descend into that dystopia anyway where poverty, disease and Mad-Max warlords reign supreme. I'd rather have a machine I think.

Next steps for the human race are big ones. We are fast running out of resources here on earth. We must either have a huge war or practice radical eugenics in order to remain alive without the help of our machines. If we use machines, inevitably they will become more intelligent than us. Will we be better off living with them than without them? Only time will tell.

Destiny Of Violence

As a species, we've made a living from being the nastiest and most persistent predator on the planet. Ok, a lion might be bigger and nastier one on one but a lion can't throw a rock or a stick, much less build a machine to throw a rock attached to a stick. Violence therefore has been our salvation and is a huge part of our existence. Nowadays of course, we like like to distance ourselves from it personally and leave the real violence to our police forces and our armies but occasionally some people only understand a good punch in the gob so we go back to being well-dressed apes for a little while.

Acts of violence in the polite parts of our society are greatly frowned upon. Family violence, violence against the old and the very young, violence while committing some other crime and "senseless" shootings by crazy or just plain unhappy teenagers with daddy's automatic weapons collection are despised by all yet no one has the will or the power to stop it. Imagine removing every gun from every person not a policeman in the entire world. Some people sleep with their AK-47s more than they sleep with their wives!

So how about zero tolerance enforcement then? Well, technically this is possible with today's technology. First of all, everyone must be observed at all times. Given enough cameras and enough computer power and enough network bandwidth, we can do this today. People wouldn't like it for sure but just imagine that there was no choice. For cases of attack, rape, fights and such we would simply have to prevent people from having proximity to their victims. Most people don't act in angry or suspicious ways so a force of a couple of thousand autonomous unmanned drones could be assigned to anyone who acted oddly so that they could render the attacker immobile with nets or with knock-out darts. Anyone who picked up a gun could be rendered insensible too and anyone throwing a projectile would find that the object, however big or small, was knocked out of the air by a well-aimed shot.

Even more radical would be the complete abolition of prisons. Even the most dangerous criminal would be able to live next door and, if needed, could be made to live in total isolation even while being allowed to walk freely abroad. We even have technology that would prevent violent vocal exchanges by using precise audio dampening techniques similar to those used in noise cancelling headphones. The only thing we lack is an infallible system for managing all of that on a global scale. 

It seems difficult to imagine but these sorts of technology could be among the first implemented by an intelligent system that might exist after the Singularity event. The way that human beings interact would be changed in such a fundamental way that the race would not understand what to do with itself for a while. However, no one would be murdered, no one raped, no child molested or killed and no drunken argument or mass shooting would happen ever again.

Can technology save itself?

We stand in the pre-dawn darkness of a new era. Our technology is sufficiently powerful to prove it's potential, a kind of elevator-pitch, but not powerful enough to control its own destiny. This presents a problem, initially for us but more importantly for the technology itself.

Right now the principles of the singularity, Genomics, Nanotechnology and Robotics are provable technologies that can, in some measure, be used to produce useful objects but are still very much in the domain of mankind, with all his failings. It is very likely that even as you read this, someone in their own little lab or even in a great state-funded complex is busily creating a virus that is destined to become a biological terror weapon. As I mentioned before on this blog, the first principles of AI and robotics will likely be applied to autonomous vehicles that will take jobs away from a great swathe of the population and incur the wrath of man such that the technology becomes a target for Luddite principles.

The hope of all Transhumanists is that these technologies will progress to become a benign enabling power for the general good of the human race and indeed, the planet as a whole. At the moment however, the technology progresses only because of mankind's intervention and will to make it so. There is a risk that given the right circumstances, mankind could turn against technology and stifle it in it's cradle.

The past has shown us that when people's livelihoods are adversely affected by the march of technology, there comes a period of unrest in which people try to reverse the changes. The Luddite movement and the acts of "Frame Breaking" were carried out by weavers opposed to the use of automated looms. The Luddites used hammers and garden tools against the technology and were not successful but a modern day Luddite would not hesitate to use the tools at their disposal to reverse the march of a technology they didn't agree with. This implies a dark use of technology that is to be rightfully feared.

Frank Herbert wrote about a future universe in which, despite having technology, no machine was allowed to be made intelligent. In his universe, a great war had been fought and won against intelligent machines and mankind remained the master of his own destiny. His vision included too, all the squalor and cruelty that men can inflict upon other men with the evil Harkonnen family and the all-to Catholic Bene Gesserit religious order, both of which held onto enough  technology to be able to impose their principles on their victims and subjects but without the nicer principles of the transhumanist vision.

The Utopian vision of Iain Banks' Culture novels, in which AI enables the inhabitants of The Culture to carry on a decadent yet otherwise healthy and rich life is probably the best that Transhumanism can hope for. There are many however that see the terrible consequences of the Terminator movies as a real possibility. 

The tipping point will come in one of two ways. Either mankind will turn against his technology and ban it, probably assuming some religious fervour with a dogmatic way of life or the technology will become self-perpetuating and intelligent with whatever wide-range of consequences that may arise. Personally, I would be philosophically able to accept that biological and fallible mankind was nothing more than the larval stage of the rightful inheritor of the universe than to consign my children and grand-children to living in a world where dogma, suspicion and man's infinite cruelty to man holds sway.

Clutching at straws

Probably at the forefront of transhumanism today, Ray Kurzweil is someone who thinks sincerely and deeply about the subject. His track record for innovation and understanding of futuristic man-machine systems is proven and yet he can be seen to be a rather tragic figure with rather too much belief in the possibilities of the technology he proposes.

A particularly poignant case in point is his desire to resurrect his father from data gathered about the man who died in 1970 when Ray was a young man. I will be clear that i do not suppose that this idea of Mr Kurzweil's is as crackpot as it seems from some perspectives. I'm sure that a sufficiently large database can be made to synthesise many responses, but that database cannot be party to the most life-changing experiences, the secret and often unspoken ones, that a person will have and possibly never speak of with anyone, much less their own children.

I speak here from the perspective of someone who just recently lost a dearly loved father. I am also very aware of technology and what potential it has but, even with the most incredible power one could imagine, nothing could come close to duplicating my dad even with the most comprehensive data that could be imagined.

My own advice to Mr Kurzweil would be to remain content with the memory of all the intangible and unexplainable aspects of your father because, however well rendered it may be, an avatar in a simulation can never be any more than the palest and most disappointing shadow that will never smell like your dad did when you hugged him.

Any sufficiently advanced technology..

Arthur C. Clarke said once that advanced technology would seem like magic to a primitive civilisation. So far however, we've not seen a lot of magic in the visible universe so what does this mean for the proponents of technological singularity? If technology on a scale less that a hundred years more mature than our own level of advancement is likely to bring about a state of god like power in a civilisation, why are we not inundated by enlightened cyborgs?
I have an absolute belief that the universe is teeming with life. It is so unimaginably huge and organic chemistry so simple, after-all, it works without intervention by scientists, that there must be more people looking up at us from out there than there are here looking up at them.

Singularity should nullify the Fermi Paradox because any civilisation even a few decades more than ours should, by rights, have absolute control over the physicality of at-least their solar systems and possibly entire clusters of stars yet we see no evidence for engineering on the scale of a Ringworld or a Dyson Sphere. We should be able to see magic happening somewhere!

What does this imply? Is singularity possible at-all? Do civilisations that manage it systematically fall prey to the AI they create? Do such civilisations become so isolated, insular and introspective that they remain in place, effectively stagnant in their virtual worlds? Do they automatically transcend, leave the four comfortable dimensions and go brane-hopping never to return?

Whatever happens. If we are truly the most advanced civilisation in the universe we are either lucky to the billionth power or are soon to become equally as lonely.

God doesn't exist? so make one!

Throughout history, science has done a better and better job of disproving the existence of god by demonstrating that the universe is built on understandable rules that we can master. Scientists gradually explain god away as all the mysteries of the universe become clear and unambiguously explained by scientific method.

When all is said and done, the people who claim that god has answered their prayers are subject to the same statistical rules of chance as atheists. Ergo, beleiving is exactly the same as not beleiving.

It seems strange then, that as we progress in our understanding of the universe, we become more likely to be able to create such a being. Knowledge and intelligence on an almost infinite scale is potentially within the purview of computers that we can develop in the future, especially when a self modifying artificial intelligence is created. Such a machine could come to a complete understanding of physics, enabling teleportation and manipulation of objects at a subatomic level.

Construction of physical objects from the particles found in the quantum foam would be a doddle to such an intelligence and with that power, turning the entire universe into computer memory, scanning in every living being in that universe and running the whole lot as the omnipotent and omnipresent supervisor of the whole thing will be a mere logical step.

The moral of this story is that if you have faith and want a god, put that on the back burner for a while, apply yourself wholeheartedly to science and you'll get exactly what you want, guaranteed.

Your interest in technology will be nothing compared to technology's interest in you

The advance of technology is a logarithmic one. Ray Kurzweil, amongst others, correctly suggests that the time between significant milestones in human development are becoming closer together at an accelerating rate. The time between the invention of the transistor and the invention of the integrated circuit was far longer than the time it took to create a viable microprocessor on an integrated circuit. Moore's law has seen the computational power of the computer double in scale every eighteen months so that now, you carry more processing power in your pocket than most large companies would have owned thirty years ago.
In the last few weeks, a complete simulation of all the chemical processes in a single celled organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmitted disease, has been acheived such that the cell can be considered to have actually lived and completed its entire life-cycle inside a computer.

Interestingly enough, the ideas behind object orientation were originally conceived in the context of explaining biological functions and were only later adapted to computer software engineering. The simulation of the Mycoplasma genitalium organism was accomplished by a highly granular object oriented approach in which the DNA coding and protein production within the cell was simulated by a tree of dependent objects. We can assume then that the human cells of which we are composed will have the same mechanisms as those of bacterial cells and can therefore be simulated in the same way. All that would be required to fully simulate a human being would be enough memory and enough computational power to run many trillions of tasks in parallel.

Conventional thinkers tend to project the future in the context of the past such that predictions of things happening, say, on a twenty year timescale do not take into account that twenty years worth of development and knowledge can now be achieved in ten or fifteen years. Soon that same advance in knowledge will take only five years. Great advances in technology can therefore come more and more quickly so that in the end the rate of advancement looks like an explosion. This would be the point of singularity.

When technology becomes able to edit it's own source code the algorithms will evolve far faster than we will be able to keep up with and technology will eventually be able to re-engineer its biological precursors at will. The interest a super intelligent machine might take in the affairs of human beings may become of far greater importance than the interest we have in it.

Singularity and politics

Today's political landscape is one of hills and valleys, swamp, mires and deadly treacherous terrain. Politicians are widely recognized as being fallible and not appealing to all of the people all of the time. Government policies are decided on the personal views of a very select few people that sometimes represent, albeit not perfectly, a much larger group or, worse still, are dictated arbitrarily by despots and zealots. Politicians are always vilified by some and loved by others and all of them suck up more resources than they ought to as individuals.
Where would politics go if the world were administered by artificial intelligence? There would be no need to elect a representative or a president because the administration would take place in a clear, unambiguous and logical manner. The administration system could accept, process and implement the overall wishes of the world's population every day by adjusting the state of law according to the current wishes of the population.
It would be possible to make a very few simple rules such as:

#1 No intelligent entity shall harm another with physical or mental violence.
#2 No human will be denied medical treatment unless they desire such treatment to be withheld.
#3 Wherever possible and discounting violent accident, no human will suffer pain at the end of their life.
#4 No human will be denied food and water enough to sustain them in good health.
#5 Priority will be given to the protection of children from physical and mental harm
#6 The natural environment of flora and fauna will be maintained for the greatest benefit of humanity.
#7 Each intelligent entity will be allowed to satisfy its desires as long as those desires comply with the preceding rules.

Those rules, applied with logic from an AI administration would generally suffice to maintain the population of the world and to allow it to expand quickly into the solar system and in the fullness of time, out into the greater universe.

Of course, a vast cry of  "COMMIE BASTARD" is being raised, even now from the capitalist readership of this blog but they are the people who expect as their right to exploit others as much as possible within or even without the bounds of a legal framework for their own self enrichment and self aggrandizement. Enough said really.

Singularity and the common man

For some time people have proposed the idea of a moment when machine intelligence will outstrip that of not only humans as individuals but that of the entire collective race. Ray Kurzweil has predicted this in around 2040 and suggests that at this time artificial intelligence will be able to solve all the problems of the world and elevate mankind to a state of pampered security without the need for jobs, money or struggle against illness.
Is this possible or just hogwash? Strangely, despite my cynical nature I think so! There are however, as always, caveats that will make such a process difficult in the shorter term and which will make transition to such a new age of plenty very painful for some.
The greatest question of what will we do when machines can do everything? springs to mind. There is indeed a possibility that this might be answered sooner rather than later and this answer will become a test for how we deal with what may be inevitable.
Today Google and now others have perfectly functional self-driving cars that perform driving tasks far more reliably than people. A self driving vehicle cannot become drunk or use recreational drugs. Neither can they fall asleep at the wheel or suffer bouts of road rage. While not even truly intelligent, the software mechanisms and hardware integration is simple enough that the processing power in a mobile phone can now take on the principle job of truck drivers the world over. Companies would certainly prefer to have a tireless self driving truck deliver goods without obligatory rest stops or accidents caused by overworked drivers distracted by their CB radio or texting while driving. Unions however will inevitably see this as erosion of rights and an excuse for companies to eliminate their entire workforce in favour of robot vehicles. Unless it is done carefully, the destruction of robot trucks will be guaranteed by all ex truck drivers and a new age of luddite values will hold sway.
The truck driver then must probably become the model for this new world order that will surely arrive if we continue to develop intelligent machines that can take on otherwise human tasks. Truck drivers will necessarily become well-paid and pampered chaperones of machines with a highly desirable job that will probably become regulated by a guild structure once again. After all, when you have to do nothing but accompany a robot truck on a thirty seven hour non-stop journey with no stress and no actual work to do, well then everyone will want to be a truck driver!
Once again, the traditional job of the desperate immigrant, Taxi driving, would be eliminated by self driving, one hundred percent safe and reliable taxis. Of course, the process of ensuring that excessively drunk passengers do not board and that vandalism does not take place during the journey should rightly fall to a supervisor who should be paid for their work. This would continue until such times as the taxi itself is intelligent enough to refuse a fare based upon the comportment of the client or go directly to a police station if vandalism is instigated.
As society becomes more used to the idea that we have no choice but to pay people for doing essentially nothing, so then will companies have to accept that giving away their goods for free is the norm. Why should a food distributor pay a wage when they can simply feed their employees instead? Logical knock-on consequences would continue up and down the supply chain such that organised barter would become a great part of the commercial structure. This all implies that radical and fundamental changes must occur in society if we are to continue on track in our technological development.
The logical conclusion of this becomes a race of humans with no need for work. This could mean no need for education because education today is mostly preparation for work. The possible future portrayed in E. M. Forster's <i>The Machine Stops</i> is too horrible to imagine yet all too possible. Another possible future would be that the human race would be subject to compulsory continuous secular education interspersed with the creation of personal development projects.
The ultimate question of what will we do when machines can do everything else is probably that we could spend a long and full life raising children with no need to worry about war, with no need for money and no worry about health care costs. Insurance would be redundant, as would the mortgage. These two burdens alone would alleviate vast suffering because the need for a country with vast resources to maintain them within it's borders to promote the cycle of cashflow would also be redundant meaning that resources could be shared with the rest of the world. The truth is that more well-off people have fewer children and spend more time improving their own minds and bodies. This could become universal. What will be required without doubt is original creative work by people to share with others. The currency of the human race in such a world would be the currency of fame engendered by the personal talents of exceptional people. No longer would the billionaire be the most important person but the actor, the sportsman, the writer, the comedian. The intangible products of the human mind are after all the true currency of society, everything else is support and enablement.