It was more than 50 years ago that I first realized that machines were going to take over the world - by which I mean that almost all the jobs that humans do would soon be done by machines.
I formed that opinion because as a mathematician I understood that a lot of our most difficult intellectual tasks could readily be accomplished by computers. Sure enough, for example, a computer became the world's best chess player.
But what really brought the revolution home recently was the understanding that machines were "driving" cars on the roads of the U.S., that is to say, there are driverless cars (put there by Google) in operation today, even as I write this. Wow!
If you browse around the internet a bit, you'll soon discover a marvelous world of robots, drones, automata, and other ilk of truly wonderful machines. It is no exaggeration to say that machines are capable of doing virtually anything that humans now do.
I think I'll save the implications of the machine revolution for a later post. Meanwhile, you think about it.
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