Breakthroughs in technology are bound to happen. If human history has shown anything then that technological advancements are an essential driving force of human culture and that societies that stop to innovate will fall behind. Humans have always been fascinated by machines and attempted to invent ever better ones that could take over more and more tasks that otherwise required human labor, from the early cranes in Mesopotamia, to the power loom, steam engine, all the way to the first industrial robots (such as welding robots in the automotive industry), to modern day aircraft, spacecraft, self-driving cars, and other kinds of autonomous machines. While machines initially were nothing but prostheses, augmenting and extending our own limited actuation capabilities, as they had to be operated by humans, automation introduced self-sufficient machines that replaced human control with artificial, albeit limited control systems that allowed for the performance of simple repeated tasks.

Kevin Kelly is a true believer in technology, not in a fanboy sense but in his unwavering confidence that huge technical leaps will change the fabric of civilization so that the unthinkable, or at least the unthought of, will become commonplace. To him these leaps are…inevitable. His treatment of the steps by which robots will take our jobs is instructive of his approach. Skeptics, citing the fact that robots currently can't move around the room with the dexterity of a four-year-old, say that worries about full robot replacement are nerd pipe dreams. Fear-mongers say that massive unemployment will be the result of businesses tossing workers in the street after work is fully automated.

In this video from TiEcon 2016, Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha from IBM and Christopher Re from Stanford present: Data Economy – Brain Inspired Computing Will AI & Robotics Make Humans Obsolete. "The human brain is an ideal model. It's small and efficient, and it can process many types of inputs almost instantly. Computers have been compared to brains since the dawn of computer science. More recently, researchers have started to design computers that are modeled on how the brain works, a field now known as neuromorphic computing. IBM has developed end-to-end technology and ecosystem to create and program energy-efficient, brain-inspired machines that mimic the brain's abilities for perception, action, and cognition. The ecosystem consists of an indexcard-sized board with 1 million neurons; a simulator; a programming language; an integrated programming environment; a library of algorithms as well as applications; firmware; tools for composing neural networks for deep learning; a teaching curriculum; and cloud enablement. The ecosystem will be demonstrated on a number of datasets with near state-of-the-art accuracy and unprecedented energy-efficiency. Today, 100 researchers at 30 universities, government agencies, and companies are exploring the ecosystem. IBM has developed new scale-up and scale-out systems -- with 16 million neurons -- that will be presented in Dr Modha's pioneering research talk. Watson wins at Jeopardy and enters industrial applications while AlphaGo defeats the human Go champion. No day goes by before the dooms day prediction of AI infused Robots taking over our world comes up in the news. Will Artificial Intelligence make us obsolete? Tech optimists like to argue a new revolution in robotics will simply eliminate old jobs and create new ones. Even as large companies look to streamline with the help of automation, new technology also opens up possibilities for new products and services. Adaptation, they contest, is what has seen society thrive since the industrial revolution. Stanford has been in the middle of AI revolution and experts including speaker Dr Chris Re will weigh in on how close we are to AI domination and how data science can help human kind."