Many humans, on the other hand, don’t learn or grow all that much once they get to adulthood. A world of robots that were programmed to be competent at their jobs, but not to learn much, wouldn’t be enormously different from our current one.
Human Level AI: The Foresight Institute
Given that most customer-facing employees of large corporations would struggle to pass a Turing test, the threshold machines need to reach to replace humans in customer service roles is not particularly high. Anyone who has attempted to resolve a problem with a bank, utility company or government body in the last decade would probably welcome the chance to interact with a machine instead of a minimum-wage, script-reading, disempowered, indifferent human – outsourced or otherwise.
It’s a fallacy to imagine that decades of exponential growth in processing power means that computers will necessarily continue to get faster and more powerful every year – Moore’s law is catchy phrase to describe an observation nothing more. It is also a questionable belief that the difference between a machine and a human is simply one of complexity, that given enough interlinked processors we could brute force intelligence. Nonetheless, it is very hard to imagine a future in which technology does not advance to the point that many social roles could not be carried out by sophisticated, automatic machines.
What then for dreams of full employment? What then for the issue of leisure? People who believe in the Singularity tend to view it with quasi-religious awe as a coming techno-rapture in which the geek shall inherit the earth and the coming SuperIntelligence will solve all problems.
There is more than enough surplus wealth already to feed and clothe the poor of the world – and yet there is no sign of this happening. Why do we imagine that the future owners of unimaginably powerful technology will be any more benevolent than the current rich?