Your article worrying about a near future in which robots have displaced humans from many jobs fails to worry about the environmental collateral damage from any such displacement (“I am a robot. I’m also a lawyer, a nurse, a waiter and a teacher”, In Focus).
The rise of the robots is a problem not just because of the immediate human cost, but because robots are fantastically energy-hungry and thus accelerate the unsustainable, insupportable damage we are doing to Earth. Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every couple of years, is about to run into the buffers: within five years, the working parts of computers will become so small that they start to become vulnerable to quantum instabilities. Thus, continuing to increase the computing power of robots is going to require much more energy in the future. (And remember: as computer parts get smaller, they also become more impracticable to recycle.)
Continue reading...via Rise of the robots will harm the Earth as well as humans | Letters
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