Yes it absolutely does worry me.
Did you hear about Flippy the robot burger flipper?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-43292047/burger-flipping-robot-begins-first-shift
Most food, auto (trucking etc, delivery, finance jobs can be fully autonomised by robots. And obviously that’s not an exhaustive list. So what happens to all that displaced labour?
I don’t believe we will end up with some benevolent government who will redistribute all the wealth saved from having robots do everything. This coupled with rising issues from pollution and overpopulation has the potential to be devastating if we don’t talk about it and come up with an action plan!
Yes, I've written an article about Flippy actually. Seems you know whats going on out there in the world of robotics at the moment!
Thats not what I am worried about. A newly documentation about AI made me guesbumps. AI in combination with robotics and genetic modification really scares me. I belive in the general good side in human nature and I am shure they will program a good AI. But where there is good there is evel, so somewhen somewhere there will appear an evil AI. And an advanced AI will come faster than we think....if not there yet in secret. How could we tell if so?
What a time to be alive, we are at a point where we have the power to create something that will pamper us, complete all the hard tasks for us whether they be manual labour or mental calculations. We could be on the brink of improving human quality of life beyond any point in history, giving people more time to do things they enjoy, more time to design, create, invent, discover and advance.
That is the sales pitch anyway... It could unfold this way, but one must ask themselves, if the current crop of 'world leaders' were to have this technology in their hands right now, ready to go, is that the kind of world they would seek to implement? Would they want billions of people of the world to have all the time in the world? If people are living their lives and enjoying it to the fullest, then they are spending money, if they don't need to work then how do we disperse spending credits to the masses of pampered humans? Will the powers that be even care? Today they must keep the masses as comfortable as they can as cheaply as possible, just enough so everyone keeps going to work, keeps sloshing those tax dollars around. What happens if there is no need for tax serfs anymore as the founder of Microsoft has already suggested that there will be a need to tax corporations by the robot. What to do with all those mouths to feed.
And what would AI think about all this? AI and technology in general is growing at a speed humans could never keep up with. AI is now creating AI that is superior to the AI that humans can create. Whether we transcend into an AI induced Utopian coma of pampering and bliss or descend into an Orwellian nightmare where our Neo-Fuederalist overlords wield AI and technology as a weapon, at some point, AI might just have plans of its own.