Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us? [Classic 2013 article]

Talk about scientific and technological developments in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us? [Classic 2013 article]

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Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?
This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It’s the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they’re computers: They never get tired, they’re never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It’s up to us.

Maybe you think I’m pulling your leg here. Or being archly ironic. After all, this does have a bit of a rose-colored tint to it, doesn’t it? Like something from The Jetsons or the cover of Wired. That would hardly be a surprising reaction. Computer scientists have been predicting the imminent rise of machine intelligence since at least 1956, when the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence gave the field its name, and there are only so many times you can cry wolf. Today, a full seven decades after the birth of the computer, all we have are iPhones, Microsoft Word, and in-dash navigation. You could be excused for thinking that computers that truly match the human brain are a ridiculous pipe dream.

But they’re not. It’s true that we’ve made far slower progress toward real artificial intelligence than we once thought, but that’s for a very simple and very human reason: Early computer scientists grossly underestimated the power of the human brain and the difficulty of emulating one. It turns out that this is a very, very hard problem, sort of like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. In fact, not just sort of like. It’s exactly like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. If you want to understand the future of computing, it’s essential to understand this.

Suppose it’s 1940 and Lake Michigan has (somehow) been emptied. Your job is to fill it up using the following rule: To start off, you can add one fluid ounce of water to the lake bed. Eighteen months later, you can add two. In another 18 months, you can add four ounces. And so on. Obviously this is going to take a while.

By 1950, you have added around a gallon of water. But you keep soldiering on. By 1960, you have a bit more than 150 gallons. By 1970, you have 16,000 gallons, about as much as an average suburban swimming pool.

At this point it’s been 30 years, and even though 16,000 gallons is a fair amount of water, it’s nothing compared to the size of Lake Michigan. To the naked eye you’ve made no progress at all.

So let’s skip all the way ahead to 2000. Still nothing. You have—maybe—a slight sheen on the lake floor. How about 2010? You have a few inches of water here and there. This is ridiculous. It’s now been 70 years and you still don’t have enough water to float a goldfish. Surely this task is futile?

But wait. Just as you’re about to give up, things suddenly change. By 2020, you have about 40 feet of water. And by 2025 you’re done. After 70 years you had nothing. Fifteen years later, the job was finished.


Exploring the Dead Internet brought me back to this lovely article, which I remember reading back in 2013 and fantasizing about for years after. I'd watch that faucet drip and think of just what the 2020s would be like.

Welp! Now we're seeing the fruits of all that computing power... And Mr. Drum's surmission of automation are very prescient. It's like reading a report of 2021 written back in 2013.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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