I did not mean to imply that opinion at all. I find that most people are more intelligent that they're given credit for -- especially more than we techies tend to give them. Hence the underlying "what will these morons do once the robots take their jobs?" tone in the discussion.

Those workers (and more importantly, the next generation of them, since this is 30 years down the line by the article's assumptions) will need to learn new skills, just like the former farm workers and their successors did. The average farm worker in 1870 didn't know how to repair machinery or type, either.

Point taken, but that's what I meant by "things we haven't thought of yet." The fuzzy traits won't be enough to compensate in the cases of jobs that don't utilize those traits, but since those traits are valuable, use will be made of them, and many of the uses are things that won't occur to us now.

You or I may not find them useful, but the fact that someone is paying people to do those things indicates that they find them useful. And which would you rather do, create commercials or shovel fertilizer? Personally I'd rather deal with the figurative BS than the literal kind.

Point taken about the article's vagueness, though they did say “if not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”

And to reiterate, I'm not saying this transition would be painless, or that it wouldn't involve major societal displacements and other changes. Going back to the agriculture example, that involved a large portion of the population moving from the countryside into the cities. Another possible basis for comparison is the collapse of the communism in Eastern Europe and the elimination, restructuring, or repurposing of all of the inefficient state-run factories, except that the automation scenario would be less sudden (the article is talking about 2045).

Back the late 1800s, agricultural work required about 3/4 of the US's population. Now it's about 3%. If, back then, you'd asked "what would happen if 96% of the farming jobs vanished?", you'd probably have gotten predictions of doom similar to this one. But what actually happened was that those people (or their descendants, rather, since this change didn't happen overnight) got employed doing other things, most of which people in the late 1800s couldn't have anticipated. The same thing will happen here. Human intelligence, creativity, and flexibility are valuable, and valuable stuff tends not to sit idle. People figure out something to do with it. There are temporary displacements and adjustments, but overall, automation doesn't idle people, it frees them up to do new things.

Note that I'm not talking about a situation where the machines are actually creatively intelligent, in contrast with something like Deep Blue being programmed ahead of time to do a highly-specific task. If we get to that point, all bets are off, but then we're venturing into singularity territory at that point, anyway.

Given the low average life expectancy of people living that close to nature, or in pre-industrial society in general, I doubt any negative effects of tobacco would have had any statistically-significant impact. Same with genetic tendency of people from sub-Saharan Africa towards higher rates of heart disease -- the vast majority of people didn't live long enough for that to matter. Likewise with lactose tolerance -- when food is chronically scarce, the extra calories from being able to consume dairy products are much more important than the drawbacks of the accompanying increase in saturated fat consumption. It's only in the last couple centuries or so that things like heart disease, stroke, and cancer have climbed up the causes-of-death list, because people have (mostly) stopped dying of starvation, malnutrition, and water/airborne diseases.

Even if it did, though, I'm curious how much the stress of getting into orbit would be, for folks who haven't fully trained for it. I presume there would be some sort of recommended work-out regimen beforehand, but astronauts and fighter pilots do a whole lot of that to withstand g-forces.

Named after the original Battlestar Galactica fighters, by the way.

Crew-assigned nicknames are almost always better and/or more-colorful than the official ones. For instance:
B-1: Lancer vs. Lawn Dart
B-52: Stratofortress vs. Big Ugly Fat Fucker (BUFF)
C-5: Galaxy vs. Fat Albert or Linda Lovelace (I presume that last comes from the fact that the C-5 can tilt the nose section upward to, err, "swallow" large items of cargo.
F-105: Thunderchief vs. Thud or Lead Sled.
F-111: No name at all! vs. Ardvaark or Switchblade.

As I said, I was comparing between the web versions, not having checked out the Android version yet. Now that I have, my opinion remains the same. To take the items you mention, one by one:

Voice transcription: that's part of the Speech to Text API of the OS. Based on a quick search of example apps, you're talking less than ten source-code statements to do the transcription. Major kudos to the API writers for making it that easy to use, but the coding required of the Keep team is very much demo-app level difficulty.

Simultaneous multi-device editing: that's part of the Google Drive API. The example Android app in the Google Drive documentation does everything that Keep does except for the checklist (which is just a custom display widget) and voice transcription (which could be added to it in a few minutes, as mentioned above). The rest is just a little UI polish.

Cross-platform: there's an Android example app for Google Drive. There's a web-based example app (more than one, actually). There's a Java one and a .NET one.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Keep is bad. It's an excellent demonstration of the power and developer-friendliness of Google's APIs, but a competitor to Evernote or Springpad, it's not. Even leaving aside that comparison, I've seen more-ambitious apps in various "How to Program Android" type of books. And I expect a bit more from Google. They made this with their own foundation and building blocks. They should get more-impressive results than this when playing on their own turf.

I've used both Evernote and Springpad, and stuck with the latter, but after fiddling around with the web interface on Google Keep for a while, my question is: this is supposed to be a rival service? It looks more like something from the example page of a web app library. All you seem to able to do is enter text notes, and lists. Perhaps Keep for Android has more functionality, but just comparing between the web versions of all three, Keep doesn't have 1/10th of the capability of either of the others. It's like comparing Word with Notepad.

Wish I had mod points at the moment.

As I've asked before of the "USian"-using trolls: do you refer to citizens of the Republic of India as "ROIans" instead of "Indians"? Because the Republic of India isn't the only country on the Indian subcontinent. Do you refer to citizens of the UK as "UKians" or "Britons"? Ireland is part of the British Isles but not part of the UK, after all.