Terminator or A. I. Love You? Discussing the robot revolution

[classicdrogn]

But you'd be so much better at laundry and dishes if you had 7 fingers on each hand!

"Specialist skill" niches are going to die outside unpaid hobbies or luxury/rarities, regardless of type, because there will only ever be so many humans with the time or talent to train them, while an AI whether pure software or controlling the required hardware can be built to order for use by the masses without. Music and visual art will be first, because getting it wrong just means trying again rather than doing damage, but more will follow as the technology matures.

Humans will only be needed to fill multiple physical roles too small to spend the money on a robot (yes, like the chores in a single home) or figure out how to solve uncommon problems or reframe them to refer to a specialist AI in a way it deal with, or to navigate and travel around uneven and disorderly spaces like natural territory or for emergency services/disaster relief. Sorry, that art degree is just fancy toilet paper in another decade at most.

Surgeons will probably hang on the longest, at least the rest of the century, as chief of an AI team working on an operation in order to make sure life's random bullshit doesn't throw a curve ball... though with that metaphor, I am reminded some people do like watching sports, so professional athletes will undoubtedly also remain.

Soldiers, too, if only because fiction has beaten in how bad an idea automated systems programmed to kill are over and over since before steam engines were a thing, and because things break in the field and figuring out how to get it unfucked enough to keep working on the field or at least fall back to a better location for more extensive repairs (and then working with the resulting lash-up) is another of those breadth-vs-depth and adaptability things, as is the boots-on-the-ground work of taking or holding territory and interacting with locals. Remotely piloted vehicles are great for the very tip of the tooth, as Ukraine has repeatedly underscored, but they still need muscle and bone for the jaw and there's a whole lot of tail behind that.

But on to the most critical question! Can we fuck the robots?

Sex slavery is the only form of the practice still widespread across the world, and certainly when only looking at developed nations. How much of that could be eliminated by the creation of acceptably realistic (or appealingly unrealistic) sexaroids? Nobody with a choice about it kept humans working cotton fields once a few machine operators using harvester tractors and cotton gins became more cost effective, so a handful of bouncers and cleaners who can double as maintenance techs for common problems plus a stable of horny-on-full-blast robots that cost less to plug in to recharge for a couple hours than supplying food and drugs to as many whores could see a lot of jobs lost to automation where the more of a social crusader a given activist is the happier they are to see them go.

You can even argue that working toward fuckable robots is the most morally correct use of the technology, since materials that can withstand harsh cleaners to keep from spreading disease are already a solved problem, forcing a human to accept such a role is a horrific violation of autonomy while training an AI to do the job is data entry, and there's no accidental pregnancy with a sexaroid.