Using people to think will be like using monkeys to test drugs

We are no Lords of Creation, more like grass of the field that caught fire.  When the fuel is gone the fire will disappear.   I see three paths of combustion:  1. The singularity is near  with a hyperbolic transformation of human nature into something other.  2.  We perish from the earth for our sins or some accident from outer space.  3:  The flare-up of consciousness passes from people to AI.   Using people to think will be like using monkeys to test drugs, a cheap work-around until something better composes itself.

Picture billions of humans, sort of the Northern Spotted Owl of tomorrow, not very useful but cheap to leave content in ecological reserves.  Today there’s worry about jobs lost to robots as San Francisco raises the minimum wage to $15 and totally awesome hamburgermachines get invented to compensate.  Tomorrow it will be so cheap to supply basic energy, food and selfies to humans that most people will have no need to work unless they have a spark within.     

Per Ardua Ad Astra will be for the very few.  All progress is self-limiting, coming up with zoning rules, copyrights, review boards and Thou Shalt Nots to keep things just the way they are after I got mine.  With self-driving cars and bicycle helmets,  eco-reserves for minnows and frogs, reflective jackets and dawn-to-dusk parent-patrolled childhood, there will be less challenge and those who survive will be both fit and un-fit.  In other words, evolution is treated like the enemy.   People as we know them are becoming less fit to survive and reproduce though richer and freer than ever before.

What fuel these mortals be.

As a conservative do you protect the fuel or the spark?

Hair's width accuracy not yet good enough for Apple's robots. Next: Will we be good enough?

Apple has told Foxconn in China to fix their assembly robots.   A hair's width averages 1/10th of a millimetre and Apple wants accuracy of 1/50th.  The clunky robots get only 1/20th because they come from the less fussy world of car assembly.  All should be fine after tweaks.  Meanwhile they just get to tighten screws, stuff like that.

Why robots?  Foxconn was in the news three years ago for hiring 1,000,000 robots  because cheap Chinese labour doesn't have the edge it used to.

It's sobering to think about manufactured servants that can swiftly and repeatably put out quality merchandise assembled accurately to the nearest 1/50th of a millimetre.  No minimum wage here.  This is the week that Stephen Hawking. made the news predicting Artificial Intelligence is likely to assume a life of its own in the very new future, out-competing our DNA brand.  Intelligence is like an infection or a virus, successful acquiring resources and getting it's code reproduced.   AI may do much better in the marketplace for energy and code.   The Singularity may be near but will it include us? 

From Macrumors:

"Foxbots" have been tasked with menial jobs that include the assembly of larger components and tightening screws. Unfortunately, the bots are proving to have an accuracy to 0.05 mm, which is above the 0.02 mm tolerance required to assemble Apple's products.

From the BBC quoting Hawking:

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said.
Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.  Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."