This is a very good article on some of the potential impacts of mass production of robots and Artificial Intelligent machines. There are going to be huge impacts on society, economics and wealth generation.
That means any job a human can do will soon be done by a machine which will probably do it even better. Plus, they won’t require rest, they’re more easily replaced and upgraded, and they don’t demand higher wages or join pesky unions.
Scary stuff indeed.
There is going to be a lot of regulation required on the use of such machines, especially when wealth generation will be concentrated in the hands of a few.
This will happen long before the big philosophical questions arise about intelligence, sentience and rights for machines. The main reason is that Artificial Intelligence won’t be one all-encompassing intelligence. Instead it will be a thousand different AI’s, each one focused on being superior in one area or on one class of problems.
In any event, how long will it be before protests start and politicians react? Perhaps in the next decade or so. All the signs point to rapid industry adoption of AI technology which can only mean less work for humans.
On Machine Intelligence 