It is insane how fast processors and computers have gotten in the past decade. I can not stop thinking about technology and the implications of the massive growth in the next few years. The goal of automation is to make human jobs easier so that humans can focus on complex tasks that require specific skills that a robot is not able to do or isn’t as efficient. There are many positives and negatives to this intense period of growth that I want to highlight here.
One example is the military. When robots will be capable enough to fight in combat, countries will not have to send human troops to lose their lives in war. This is a huge advantage for countries with robots. However, the problem that this creates is that countries with expansive military budgets will have more robots and less developed countries will have more people. Ironically, governments take advantage of the emotional appeal of soldiers dying to justify using these robots. It is a slippery slope to delve into this discussion, especially considering the cyberattacks that these armies will be vulnerable from, including if terrorist groups gain control. We also need to keep in mind who will make these ethical decisions. Old politicians in air-conditioned offices should not be the ones to choose when they won’t live long enough to bear the implications. 
The rapid technological advancement has a side effect: equipment that used to be untenable suddenly gets so cheap that the general public can buy it. Things like 3D printers and the Raspberry Pi are great examples of this. But the government can also attain a lot of microcomputers and use it to track people. This has already happened in China where the government has really advanced facial recognition software which they use against certain groups and individuals.
Additionally, drone technology will really become a big industry. A really good example is right now during a pandemic, we need to deliver goods without human contact to avoid spreading an infectious disease. Drones will enable unimaginable delivery speeds and resolve a lot of inefficiencies and free up space on the roads. But this brings up the question of whether this will make us more connected or less connected as we communicate with more robots and fewer humans. 
Our homes and cars and brains could get so connected, we would only have to think about turning on a light or preparing food. This could lead the population to get lazier or more productive with our time depending on how we use all these freed-up resources. As I was typing this blog, I made some spelling errors and just ignored all of them. In the end, I was able to click the spell check and correct all my mistakes. The AI has evolved so much that it read all my words correctly, including ones I couldn’t have deciphered. It’s amazing how much it has improved just in the last year. I am not learning from my mistakes. But does it matter as I am able to focus on other more important things?
When so much change happens so quickly, people can get apprehensive. For example, self-driving cars went from science fiction to be on the road in a few short years. Today we can buy products such as the Comma 2 that will plug into your car and turn it into a level 2 self-driving one for only about $1000 which is 5 times less than Tesla’s package. Something like this would have been seen as impossible only a few years ago, nowadays you can automate many things in your house as a weekend project. The news only covers self-driving car crashes and electric car fires because they are so rare. It shows the unprecedented technological growth rate we are currently experiencing and how people are reacting to this change.
I think there are two possibilities of how our world will progress once robot consciousness outgrows human capabilities. One is that the future versions of Watson, the Google autonomous car, the BigDog robot from Boston Dynamics, drone aircraft, and lots of other smart machines decide to work together to eliminate mankind after realizing how humans poorly treat technology. The other option is that we humans don’t fight with machines, instead, we join with them, uploading our brains into the cloud and otherwise becoming part of a technological singularity.
“When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” This quote was in The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and sums up what I think the future will hold for us. 
Hi Jimit!
The world of automation is really interesting to me as well. Considering how most developments in this field have occurred within the last decade, it really does seem like it won’t be long before it is present in every aspect of our lives. Before we start doing this, though, it is definitely worth asking if we should put automation everywhere. There are lots of possible downsides or problems that can come from automation that could be potentially dangerous to humanity. Not necessarily a physical sort of danger, like what you wrote about the first of the two possibilities for the future, but a psychological one. As machines begin to know more about us than we do, it may cause problems for us as their behavior influences ours, and causes us to make decisions that we otherwise might not have. You mentioned the possibility of even our brains becoming connected, which could obviously pose a threat in manipulating our human psychology.
Hey Jimit!
I really like reading your blogs about tech, they’re very interesting. I like the part at the end, though, and your hypothesis about how technology will evolve in the future. I always thought that one day (maybe even soon) we would hit some sort of soft cap for our limits, but that what people thought many decades ago …… just things to chew on. Nice read.