Absolutely completely agree.
And the shocking thing is, absolutely no-one of the global leadership, not May, not Trump, not Xi or Abe or Putin or Modi or anyone in the EU, wants to confront this debate in public. Why? It’s not as though they don’t know what’s coming — they are (of necessity) amongst the most well informed people on earth, so why are they avoiding this debate, why are they all seemingly *still* fighting the battles of the 20th century, of the 1980’s no less, when an absolute global disaster is potentially on the doorstep?
In my view large-scale automation is arriving much, *much* faster than even those people who know about it and write about it seem to project, but you are the first person I have come across who seems to have some grasp of the sheer speed and simultaneity which automation is going to unfold.
This might sound completely nuts but I believe we will lose between 30–45% of all current jobs globally in just over a decade and around 85% in two decades. That’s not to say other jobs won’t be created. I reckon the tipping point when hundreds of millions start losing not just jobs but entire careers and professions will be circa 2025.
I also think machine intelligence (even without sentience) will match human-level processing in not much over two decades. By that point, humans will be scrambling to keep up by (i) re-engineering/dicking around with our own genetics (ii) us injecting machines into us (iii) us injecting us into machines.
But it’s not clear if this too will be a losing fight… you can’t necessarily strap a jet-engine to the roof of a Ford Model-T and expect it to survive the strain…But machine intelligence is eventually likely to go past humans (or whatever we have turned overselves into by then) regardless of what we do — this is a basically down to fact that we are stuck in biological timescales and machine intelligence operates in electronic ones, many orders of magnitude faster. So in the long term we either give up every aspect of our biology, i.e. not be human anymore, just to avoid being superseded by our own creations or we die out.