Goods and food made, served and delivered by humans will some day (and soon) be an artisanal and specialized field, the same way some still buy handmade shoes at a great expense, but most of us hop around on the machine-manufactured kind. That’s right, the wealthy will say, an actual lady’s hands touched my carrots! How smart!

Seriously, almost all of us are eventually being replaced at work by robots, with almost every task that can be automated being automated, and there’s no economic plan in place to deal with that onrushing reality. How do we reconcile a free-market economy with a highly automated one? Of course, I’m just talking about Weak AI. What happens if something stronger comes along, which will likely occur if we go on long enough? As the song says, we’ll make great pets. From recent Steve Wozniak comments reported by Brian Steele at MassLive:

“I love technology, to try it out myself,” said Wozniak. “I’ve got at least 5 iPhones. … I have some Android phones.”

He imagined a world in which these kinds of devices would be able to teach our children for us.

“A lot of our schools slow students down,” he said. “We put computers in schools and the kids don’t come out thinking any better.”

Rather than just putting more gadgets and gizmos in the classroom, he said, each classroom needs to have fewer students, and kids who are further ahead than their peers should be nurtured, not forced to fall in line.

Dismissing the concern over giving artificial intelligence too much intelligence, he said that’s already happened.

“The machines won 200 years ago. We made them too important,” said Wozniak. “That makes us the family pet.”•