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Physicists, philosophers, professors, authors, cognitive scientists, and many others have weighed in on edge.org's annual question 2015: What do you think about machines that think? See all 186 responses here
Also, what do you think?
My 2ยข: There's been a lot of focus on potential disasters that are almost certainly not going to happen. E.g. a robot uprising, or mass poverty through unemployment. Most manufacturers of artificial intelligence won't program their machines to seek self preservation at the expense of their human masters. It wouldn't sell. Secondly, if robots can one day produce almost everything we need, including more robots, with almost no human labour required, then robot-powered factories will become like libraries: relatively cheap to maintain, plentiful, and a public one will be set up in every town or suburb, for public use. If you think the big corporations wouldn't allow it, why do they allow public libraries?
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Friday January 23 2015, @12:56PM
The people who have access to unmined mineral wealth, the climate and space and water to grow corn or trees, &c.
Which seems fine until you look at how much of the earth has already been used up, where the remaining minerals are and what they are and in what volume they are left (phosphorous is particularly sobering and troubling --- there's a reason why China has stopped exporting it).
Hal Clement seemed to've been on to something in his science fiction short story "The Mechanic" which envisioned genetically engineered lifeforms "mining" the ocean for minerals by processing sea water.
Marshall Brain's novella "Manna" has an interesting take on the societal aspects --- the first half seems all-too likely: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
Sobering numbers:
- we're burning 10 calories of petro-chemical energy as fuel or fertilizer to make 1 calorie of food energy
- one of the bounds of energy is the earth's ability to radiate heat off into space:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ [ucsd.edu]
- each year our society is using 2.5 times the renewable resources which our planet is able to renew each year --- as peak oil goes past and the reserves of non-renewables are used up things are going to get nasty
- China and India have a population of men w/o the prospect of marriage equal to that of the entire U.S.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @04:07PM
To balance that, the second half seems all-too unlikely.