Anything we can do, they can do better

4 June 2017, 01:10 | Updated: 4 June 2017, 01:16

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In less than 50 years, artificial intelligence will be able to beat humans at everything we do.

There isn't a single thing we can do now that won't be done better by a robot within most of our lifetimes.

The future is racing towards us and it's being driven by Arnold Schwarzenegger who is coming to terminate our jobs.

A new study from researchers at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, Yale University, and AI Impacts suggests that even having a giant brain and working for Oxford or Yale University won't save you.

They say that within the next ten years alone, AI will outperform humans in language translation and delivery driving.

The first seems an obvious job for automation, the second we have been hearing about for a while.

In the near future, white vans will swerve lanes without indicating and drive themselves right up to your tail lights and flash you to get out of the way for doing 30 in a 30 zone.

No human driver required.

What is less expected is that artificial intelligence will be able to write school essays better than we can inside ten years and they won't need to copy them off the internet.

Computers will be able to do this in nine years according to the researchers who asked 352 leading experts for their predictions.

They say machines could be writing bestselling books by 2049. The next Jeffrey Archer will be an electronic, blinking box in a cupboard.

The experts, all leaders in their field say that even shop staff will be collecting their P45s
inside 20 years. In retail, robots will be able to replicate the human touch.

In the future, you will be efficiently ignored by a cyborg as you stand expectantly at the counter, waiting to pay.

They say that there is a 50 percent chance that artificial intelligence will outperform humans in all tasks in just 45 years and that it is just as likely that there will be absolutely nothing for us meat sacks to do any more by 2140.

If there's anything we have learned from the advance of AI, it is that the seemingly impossible becomes reality much quicker than expected and becomes essential almost immediately it appears.

Smart phones are only ten years old. The first iPhone came out in 2007.

Most people who have one now have only owned one for a few short years but we are now completely addicted to them.

We will probably be similarly enamoured of the robots that are coming to replace people’s jobs. All of them except the ones coming to replace our own jobs.

Those down the food chain are likely to lose theirs first. The less you earn, the more likely you are to lose out. That seems to be the way of the world.

That is going to be a bad outcome for millions of people but a bad outcome for humankind is less likely.

Computer calculations show only a 5% probability of the advance of AI resulting in the sort of doomsday scenario depicted in the Terminator films.

But that could be just what the robots want us to believe!