By Ellen Blaufarb and Bob Silver

In the July 1960 magazine Horizon, Eric Larrabee wrote an article entitled, “After Abundance, What?”. He quoted a Mr. Corso. “It won’t be long,” he said, “before everyone will sit in bed and eat big fat pies. They got machines now to do the work. People got to start thinking. That’s what’s going to save us. Everyone staying in bed eating big fat pies and thinking.There won’t be anything else to do.”
That was 1960 and now in 2017, 57 years later we are beginning to bake our big fat pies because we are on the brink of creating the robots that will do our work.
These robots will do heavy lifting, manufacturing, transportation (trucking, driving cars), perform medical and financial diagnosis, clean our homes, do basic law, deliver goods and provide companionship.
What work will we need to do? Nothing. The robots should be able with artificial intelligence and mobility to replace all human endeavors.
State-of-the-art computer chips are being designed to enable robots to read our emotions and respond. Everything that a person would do as a therapist could be programmed into a mental health robot.
Robots are performing surgery.
Probably many of us will not be around to profit from this much change. 57 years later from Corsco’s prediction we still need to get out of bed.
What might the future world look like? People will have to be on the government dole as employment disappears. There will be some jobs left perhaps, but robots could possibly be created to invent better robots and fix broken machines.
This is not science fiction. It is all happening now and we have the responsibility to control where this takes us. We will determine how much freedom robots can have and to make sure that they are moral, ethical creations.
So the bad news is that we can create a world that is controlled by robots. With the profit motive driving the push for AI, care must be taken with its application. Elon Musk stated that we must have the controls in place to insure moral and ethical machines.
In the near future:
A Chinese cellphone company is releasing the first AI computing chip in October and is bound to bring new surprises.
The next Apple iPhone will activate by recognizing your face. The next generation will be able to read your emotions.  There are two companies in the Bay Area working on reading human thought. Typing or speaking on a microphone, inputs, won’t be required.
Artificial intelligence advancements are exploding because of the breakthroughs in programming. You might be wearing a helmet in five to ten years that can read your thoughts and provide for your needs. We could potentially become a blend of human and machine.

Ellen Blaufarb is a Marriage Family Therapist. Bob Silver is an Electrical Engineer and Computer Geek from M.I.T. His teams can be thanked for the silicon chips that brought forth today’s technology. Or not thanked, that is.

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