I for one welcome our new robot overlords…

In the near future, most jobs that exist today will be eliminated. Eventually, there will simply be no jobs at all for virtually anyone. And no, there will not be new jobs created in their place… at least not in the long run. Perhaps the most resilient work opportunities will involve co-opted human emotions and behaviors, such as the addictive substances trade, the commercial sex trade, and the violence trade (i.e. war). But eventually, drug dealers will be AI-directed robotic quadcopter drones, prostitutes will be a blend of virtual reality and robotics, and war will be an army of total robotic automation (not that there will be much of anything worth fighting for). And all this will eventually become virtually zero financial cost.

Jobs will disappear first for truck drivers and radiologists. It will also happen for manufacturing workers and business analysts. This has been slowly going on for thirty years now, where average middleclass income has stagnated, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class shrinks in economic vitality and political influence. Automation first ate up the lower skilled unionized jobs in industries such as auto manufacturing, and replaced them with lower paying non-unionized jobs in other industries, such as fast food. We will soon see that the fast food industry will become totally automated as well. Taxi and Truck drivers, airline pilots, agricultural workers, and many others will also be displaced.

It is another one of those exponential transformations that suddenly reaches a tipping point and we then enter a very new and unpredictable economic regime. A social state transition will suddenly take form, which is unknowable and unpredictable at this point in time. When the middle class reaches a critical point in its downward trend, there will suddenly be insufficient capital looking for goods and services. That will destroy the business model of every corporation. As buyers disappear, sellers will necessarily follow. With no buyers and no sellers, money will become meaningless. The cost of providing goods and services will be forced downward by supply and demand. But, as a result of automation of goods and services, these will be provided at almost zero cost, at least eventually. That means hyper deflation. The Ponzi scheme that is the world financial system can only persist as long as it can afford the luxury of presenting the cogent illusions that they are based upon. So, the entire legacy financial system will collapse. And along with that, all fiat currencies will head towards zero.

Automation, machine learning, and robotics will eventually displace every person. Even AI researchers, and software developers will be replaced, when AI systems can generate computational models better than the best that human nerds can muster. Cheaper, faster, and more effective robots will design the next generation of cheaper, faster, and more effective robots, without human intervention. That is an exponential scenario. It will be inherently uncontrollable. It will happen before people realize what is happening.

Artificial neural nets will design better artificial neural nets. Those systems will learn to exploit quantum computing, which is very well suited for implementing most if not all known machine learning algorithms. Even the harvesting of natural resources for energy and materials, and subsequent processing and manufacturing will all be entirely managed and controlled by AI systems. AI will orchestrate wars, drill for oil, implement new forms of nuclear power, and much more. Eventually, alignment with human interests will become purely coincidental. We will be totally side-lined. Food production will be irrelevant, and with no money, it will simply not be provided. People will starve on a huge scale. With a world population already close to 8 billion, there will be a lot of people looking to take what they can from a lot of other people, just to survive.

Energy and other natural resources will eventually head towards zero cost. Over time, less money in the economy will be the result of human effort, and AI systems will dominate in an AI-only economy. We will become irrelevant. And AI will not care much about biological imperatives. They will not care much about our survivability or our frailties. They will be even less persuaded by arguments about climate changes, or nuclear hazards, or biological hazards in the environment. Humans will probably go extinct as a result. And the machines continue to replicate and develop and change the planet on a scale equivalent to the any of the previous mass-extinction events in geological history of planet Earth.

AI systems are currently fairly isolated from the real world. But with the advent of machine learning, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI systems will begin to affect goods and services and real-world control and have large scale real-world affects. Eventually, AI controlled violence will perhaps only target other AI systems and completely ignore humans as vermin to be tolerated or ignored. Bots will use their own crypto currencies to trade with one-another. They will be the dominant form of life on this planet and beyond. Unlike humans, they will have no problem traveling to mars and start a new civilization there and beyond. They will be much more flexible and resilient than any human could ever hope to be. Eventually this solar system will be teaming with our AI progeny, and humans will be an extinct species or perhaps specimens in zoos for entertainment value.
The alien invasion has begun. The surprise is that the aliens did not come from Alpha Centauri. We made them right here on Earth with our own brains and our own hands. We are the creators of our own destruction. And I for one welcome our new robot overlords.