In addition to "will the robots get there?" there's also the question "at what cost?". The faith-basedness of it is almost fractal: - "Given this thing I saw a

In addition to "will the robots get there?" there's also the question "at what cost?". The faith-basedness of it is almost fractal: - "Given this thing I saw a computer program do, clearly we'll have intelligent AI real soon now." - "If we generate sufficiently smart AI then clearly all the jobs will go away because the AI will just do them all for us" - "We'll clearly be able to do the AI thing using a reasonable amount of electricity" None of these ideas are "clear", and they're all based on some "futurist faith" crap. Let's say Microsoft does succeed (likely at collosal cost in compute) in creating some humanlike AI. How will they put it to work? What incentives could you offer such a creature? What will it want in exchange for labor? What will it enjoy? What will it dislike? But we're not there yet, first show me the intelligent AI then we can discuss the rest. What's really disturbing about this is hype is precisely that this technology is so computationally intensive. So of course the computer people are going to hype it--they're pick and shovel salespeople supplying (yet another) gold rush.