Frankly, technology is a much safer bet than human capital. Capital tends to have a fixed investment base with a relatively well-known maintenance schedule. Labor, on the other hand, is fraught with pitfalls: changing laws, rising insurance costs, performance variances. Not to mention, it's rare that machinery gets poached by your competition.

Creativity is the area that machines will suck at for the foreseeable future. Anyone in manufacturing should start looking toward a career in process design instead.

I may sound callous with this, but those with the money (certainly not me) only care about growing the money with as much guarantee as they can. The rest is annoying details. Given their position, it's unlikely you can say with certainty that you'd act any differently.

Well, then, flipping burgers is out:
http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/

Why on Earth is this modded "Troll"? The first question is rhetorical, not trolling.

Well, no you don't actually. We may want to, or choose to, but we don't have to. It's more likely that we'd find life there and use that as an argument in favor of moving there. If Mars is shown to support any kind of life, it will radically change the way we as a culture view our place in the universe, and likely touch off some sort of mass effort to spread ourselves around, alien bacteria, lichens, ichthyoids, and the rest be damned. It'll be Manifest Destiny all over again.

Sorry, but while your rudimentary concept is reasonable, one practicality stops it: at a certain point, the ice around the tether is going to freeze up, stopping the descent of the probe, which will end up hanging in its own little bubble of hot water. Now, studying that bubble might have some value, as we would probably find residue from whatever is in the ocean (if there's fish, we might find the up-welled bones and scales, for instance). Better to figure out some wireless communication technology that will work through several kilometers of ice without getting swamped in Jupiter's radiation output.

And how far apart are those existing vehicles? What's between them? How hard is the terrain to navigate? Are the components of one system compatible with another? It's cheaper and much more viable to just send fresh units, targeted for specific purposes and specific locations.

Just to clarify, 2020 is only eight years from now.

FTA:

I wonder... if we're pulling uranium out of the ground and refining it, are we slowly pulling out the fuel that drives our plate tectonics?

Maybe we need a new way to look at the table:

http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1373923/Rebuilding_the_Periodic_Debate__Philip_Stewart.html

So, can you fill us in? What are the implications of such discoveries? Or is this another one of those things that happen (a happy accident) with no real consequence besides filling up a few research papers?

Right. And ultimately, the benevolent overlords that we give complete control of our society to will be the sizes of cake tins with no capability for self mobility. That will be left to the robot butlers that carry the overlords on neck chains, looking like diminutive versions of Flavor Flav. Bi-di-bi-di...bi-di-bi-di.

I find it more likely that, from the point in time that a computer achieved sentience to the time we were outmatched, we'd have time to realize we were screwed. Of course, I'm not the first one to think this.

I suppose that sooner or later we'll invent the next big thing that could kill us all. Even if in the study of how to deal with it, we accidentally invent it, at least there's a reasonable chance that, in the act of creation, we will have discovered a solution to the new problem. Like where the off switch is for the gone-mad computer.

Bad timing. The best deals on TVs are always the day before Superbowl Sunday (at least in the U.S.).