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As the needs and rewards decline, innovation suffers.

The needs and rewards are pretty goddamn big today, what with the record number of shaven, upright apes surviving longer and longer.

I think we've been heading towards a leveling out with technical advances.

I would disagree. So far history is on my side. But as a point in your favor the majority of people through history have agreed with you that their time was when progress would slow down.

As the needs and rewards decline, innovation suffers.

If robots become capable and creative enough to push humans out of all the jobs that currently exist, then they will also be capable and creative enough to continue to innovate. And they'll do it at a exponential rate compared to our simple geometric rate. See "the singularity".

TPRJones wrote:

I think we've been heading towards a leveling out with technical advances.

I would disagree. So far history is on my side. But as a point in your favor the majority of people through history have agreed with you that their time was when progress would slow down.

Progress is still on a huge upward swing in terms of velocity and acceleration. How long did it take to go from the stone age to bronze to iron? Now, excepting the slip back that was the medieval period, how long did it take to go from that to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution? Now how about from there to the digital age?

Don't forget the Service economy. That one was between the Industrial and Digital economies. And I'm sure the Digital economy is soon to be replaced by something else.

http://gizmodo.com/why-it-matters-that- ... 1791565551

Ai winning at poker. Sorry for gordonlink

Where can I place a bet?

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin believes there's little reason to worry. In an interview with Mike Allen of Axios, Mnuchin was asked how artificial intelligence would affect jobs (around the 46.50 second mark).

"In terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs, we're, like, so far away from that that it's not even on my radar screen," he said. He said it would be "50 or 100 more years" before humans should worry about robots making them dispensable.

Just to pick apart the article...

And, on a grander scale, what if a robot came along that could code even faster than Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and be a slightly better speaker?

First off, I'm pretty sure he's a shitty one of both of those things. I think he's better at fucking over his biz partners than his partners were at fucking him over. Secondly, until quantum computing becomes a commercial and, most importantly, domestic reality, there are hard, definable limits on what computer algorithms can accomplish. They have some very, very convincing mathematics behind them. Until someone cracks true AI, competent programmers aren't going anywhere. The useless ones that write code which can be automatically generated are.