
A world where everyone has a robot: why 2040 could blow your mind - peter123
http://www.nature.com/news/a-world-where-everyone-has-a-robot-why-2040-could-blow-your-mind-1.19431
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Retric
It's odd, but I keep feeling like the pace of progress is slowing down. When
was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”

A PS 4 feels somewhat better than a PS3 which was release 10 years ago.
Cellphones seem stuck on the black rectangle design. Cars are getting ever so
slightly better cruise control every year vs. becoming self-driving.

We almost have a cure for AIDS except not quite.

Or is that just me?

~~~
JeffL
My iPhone and iPad. It's not _that_ many years that I've had them and they are
nothing like anything I ever used before.

My dad's electric RAV4 made with Tesla components. That thing is so quiet and
smooth and can accelerate like crazy.

My quadcoptor with HD camera is pretty awesome, and unlike anything available
before.

Uber feels vastly superior to me than taxis or even renting a car in some
cases.

This one might be weird, but I play a lot of games, and I feel like Heroes of
the Storm which came out last year is vastly better than any other game I've
ever played in my life. Maybe that's just me? :)

Reading HN and Reddit is a vastly superior experience to reading newspapers
and magazines.

I feel very excited to be alive with all the innovation going on.

~~~
jonsen
You are describing state of the art, not addressing the speed of progres.

~~~
JeffL
I was just responding to the question: When was the last time you used a
product and said “this is vastly better?”

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kristopolous
am I crazy to think the cultural shift in the rich world will actually be to
more local communities, a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening
and craftsmanship to form a low ecological impact society of selected
technology?

I don't see the upcoming generation as being dazzled by accumulation and
owning stuff. Nor do I see them wanting to ride on the hands of leisure. I see
a culture of rejection of the codependence of infrastructure.

When looking at 2040 you have to look at teenagers right now and understand
what kind of society they'll be building.

And personally I don't see one with a bunch of robotic assistants.

Sure they have lots of screentime but that's for communication far more than
labor reduction. These teens aren't tabulating Excel columns for hours on end.
We are amidst a revolution of distributive communication that's being
manifested by a revitalization of community.

The barriers to engagement will eventually be expunged, not fortified.

~~~
thangalin
> a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening

Gardening for food, no. Craftsmanship, yes.

From a previous thread...

Everyone thinks about food in terms of economic costs. Few people consider the
time that's involved. Yes, food is already cheap, but it isn't _free_ because
of the time humans spend involved in its production. That time must be
remunerated, otherwise we'd call it slavery.

Imagine removing humans from the food equation, altogether. Production
(vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles),
clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing
crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic
polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular, 3D-printed
robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.

Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the
economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work for food (also
known as indentured servitude). Such trades probably predate agriculture.

Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and
impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines.
Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when
rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps
unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought
throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the
masses through control of food and knowledge.

The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet, have liberated our
minds. In his plan for food control genocide, Henry Kissinger wrote, "Who
controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can
control whole continents."

Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend
our time by removing another way to control the masses. In much the same way
that lowering the cost to disseminate information liberated humanity from
traditional slavery.

In that same 1974 plan, Henry Kissinger proposed rationing food in developing
nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people
from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that
empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces
birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was wrong about the best way to curb
birthrates, but right about how to shackle a population.

With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is
the most precious of commodities. What if we didn't have to work for food,
but, instead, could invest our time devoted to our passions?

Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I
assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an
insignificant minority. And yes, there are people who will loaf about in ways
that contribute little to the advancement of humanity, but shouldn't that,
too, be a right--if not, who are we to say how people should spend their time?

What's ironic about this idea is that the outcome of a work-free society is a
consequence of free-market capitalism. Capitalism is the driving force behind
maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Once food is free, capitalism implodes.
And maybe that's a good thing.

~~~
kristopolous
I thank you for the time it took to write this! I'm looking at it from the
perspective of already irrigated land though.

Recently I've taken up urban harvesting. There's a loquat tree at a local gas
station. Out by the river there's an orange and lemon tree. Near my office
there's an avocado tree.

We have mostly ornamental horticulture in urban environments. I'm suggesting
it will tend to be more functional overtime as resources are strapped and
people turn to more fresh, natural, and regional foods.

The other aspect is that it's good for the psyche: urban harvesting is
meditative and calming. There's been a large rise in community gardens and a
number of schools have set aside plots of land for it.

In a way, you need to categorize it with physical recreation. Put it in the
same group as say, jogging, yoga, martial arts, pickup soccer.

Every trajectory in rich-people's food culture is going exactly this way. When
I introduce the idea to my peers in the 100k+ income group, something _clicks_
and now they are mapping out where the trees are and some have started
planting their own.

I routinely engage with teenagers (through aikido) and when I've told them
about this, the reaction has been almost universal: "Oh you just started doing
that? Do you know about the pomegranate tree over yonder, or the kumquat tree
near this fence?"

Those are the people that will be running the world in 2050.

And what about the low-income people who have succumbed to food deserts after
the corporate supermarkets exited the market? Recently, in south LA,
cooperative farming initiatives have been popping up. There's one I saw in
Lynwood and two in South Gate. I've heard about a budding one in Compton. This
is the communities response to the corporate exit.

The change will and has always come from the people - not their possessions.

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ape4
A world where everyone has a smartphone ... just imagine!

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marcosdumay
The only commentary I can have about that infographic with trends is... It's
so mundane. Even boring.

There's no surprise. Everything just goes up at the previous exponential. No
big hit, no saturation. Nothing ever changes.

Ok, there's another commentary, in that something that boring is almost
certainly wrong on several counts.

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coldcode
By 2100 maybe we are robots. Or back to the stone age.

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cynical_sheet
Why is enslavement of members of homo sapiens species illegal and wrong, but
enslavement of AI robots legal and acceptable?

~~~
jonsen
Because legislation is mostly reactive.

