Once again, you have produced an essay of astounding length and intricacy.

While I can't possibly answer to all the nuances of your argument, I agree that our social structure is based on scarcity. We are quickly approaching a post-scarcity society - through labor replacements, more efficient technologies and the potential for superstructures such as solar power satellites, space elevators and so on.

I don't think that decisions about the social aspects of this work lie in the hands of the roboticists, though they probably understand more than anyone the long term potential for their machines to replace all labour. I think that those decisions lie with the general populance.

I for one would love the transition to a gift economy (or perhaps something more like the Star Trek economy) - our capitalistic society has worked well for us so far, but soon the few things that humans can UNIQUELY do will have to be encouraged. Capitalistic mechanisms are very good at keeping the rich rich, like you say. Much better to free people from the need to get enough food and shelter to survive and then to capture the public imagination with mega projects that really do require human involvement.

My main point is that we shouldn't fear technology. I agree with the thesis of your argument which seems to be that massive change is coming, so we better embrace it and prepare for it.

It really is just a matter of time until all the unskilled labor is replaced. I hope at this point that every human whose job is threatened is capable of finding a calling that is uniquely human.

Woah. I'll have to come back to this one. But you present a compelling case in both posts Paul.

In general I'm against the idea that there is a limit to how far we can go. There is a lot of uncharted territory, that is for sure. We certainly have come up with ways to keep ourselves busy - ways that seemed unimaginable 100 years ago when industrialization greatly reduced the requirements for raw labor.

We cannot be sure that we don't come up with another higher calling that robots can't do over the next 100 years.

If you are the sort of knowledge worker who can program robots, your labor is not in competition with the abilities of this robot.

In general, people in modern countries are expected to constantly do more and more complex things for the same pay. Think of it as a physical Turing test.

There is no upper limit on how much work there is to do, as you said there is no scarcity - of work. Don't worry about robots making us all jobless.

My Startup GridSpy is based around this sort of monitoring, but making it easier to install and use.

My startup, GridSpy is a web based power monitoring system and I think that you are totally right.

Most homeowners are relatively minor power users and probably have a fairly good idea where the power is going already. Like you say, the cost of a monitoring solution is more than the likely savings over the course of a year.

However, there are lots of exceptions where power monitoring is useful. You might be considering upgrades to your house and you want to know where to put the money in. If your bill is mostly hot water heating, you might install solar hot water. Perhaps the heating turns out to be the major power hog so you improve your insulation and install a new heat pump.

After you have made these changes, it is very difficult to actually prove that there was an improvement unless you are monitoring the power for the related circuits. GridSpy is perfect for this.

I think that the value add is even more evident for industrial scale power users or for off-grid homes, where the power cost is high enough to dwarf the cost of the monitoring equipment.

Shameless Plug:

My startup Gridspy also helps you to track your power usage, but with a web focus. You can see your power usage online, and the install is simple (you do it at the breaker box) so it doesn't require new appliances.

I've also written about how GridSpy works

There are already automation systems for warehouses, for instance robotic forklifts http://www.inro.co.nz/

Humans are great at packing odd shaped stuff. But when you have a lot of regular objects, look out for robots. This is just a matter of low hanging fruit - why make a flexible robot when simple robots are cheaper and the market is still huge and unsatisfied.

Grabbing large quantites of ingredients is a large scale logistical exercise. There are very few "moves" and a lot of small difficulties. Humans make sense here.

Construction is moving more in the direction of prefabed portions, where the tree was cut robotically by an operator assisted machine. The frames assembled in a factory under robot control. Humans on the job site are doing less and less of the raw, repetitive framing work - again we are well suited to decision making.

I like to think that Robots are doing all the boring stuff so we can do the fun stuff.

If you watch the video you'll see that the destination platform is under computer control. The pick and place machine probably knows (well in advance) where the wiimote commands have told the platform to move. There is a 100-500ms latency between tilting the controller and the platform velocity changing.

If the platform was attached to a long handle that a human could pull back and forth quickly I'd be more impressed. The platform could have a sensor underneath to tell the robot where it was or you could make the platform trackable by camera (which would add considerable latency).

However, most robots have well defined workspaces that don't have outside influences. A robot doesn't have to pass such a test to be useful.

It would be great to group all emails marked as spam by gmail into one folder, group it by spammer (or just main contents of message) and make those emails available to lawyers / forensics experts hoping to do some investigative research and bring a class action lawsuit.

If they simply picked the most "popular" spam message every week and got an award of $1000 per email when they located the spammer (keeping say 10%) it would be a nice profitable business.

Further - they cannot afford to do this sort of investigation on every single one of the millions of videos on Youtube.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/every-minute-just-about-a-days-worth-of-video-is-uploaded-to-youtube/

I imagine that they have only had the resources to investigate a sample of the alleged videos well after the fact.