Will my job soon be replaced by robots?

A new robot just discovered that a mixture of elements that can fight cancer can also treat malaria. Will artificial intelligence be able to unearth life-saving drugs quicker and more inexpensively than humans can?

Each day, the robot scientist checks whether 10,000 chemicals are toxic to humans. One human can typically screen only 10 to 20 chemicals a year.

Story.

Or maybe it will free us all to become literary critics and anthropologists.

11 Responses

  1. Uh, no. See: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/what-your-computer-cant-know/

    Ok, to actually see the thing you have to login or register, but this is a terrific short review of the problems with thinking in terms of “machine intelligence”. Searle, he of the Chinese Room mind experiment, has been trying to get people to think straight about the subject for 20 years. And, of course, there are still people so snowed by increases in computing power that the idea of computers actually thinking keeps cropping up. They can’t. End of story.

  2. Literary critics or anthropologists may a deadend too, post modernism generator is getting refined and refined.

  3. Can robots solve the development problem. Robotic development could become the new silver bullet. Is that what the r in rct stands for or would it become an rrct. But they could be programmed with a typical development worker personality to make them interesting. They would always smile without getting wrinkles. Do development workers age prematurely by having to smile too often or is it something else that causes it. However I don’t think this machine wheeling about in Kisumu would impress the locals much. Maybe it would be seen heading for Lake Victoria with a fishing rod and saying, if robots can speak, teach them how to fish, teach them how to fish, .. It would trip up – do robots trip up – at the first pothole.