"A couple of decades ago, when I was feeling optimistic, I envisioned this future as a Jetsons-esque world, where the noisy clang of machinery would give way to a soft electrified hum while robots and artificial intelligence performed menial and mundane tasks, freeing us to live like George Jetson, working a leisurely nine hours a week as a digital index operator at a space sprocket firm."
"This new era would be a vast improvement over the worn-out Industrial Age, mainly because it would come with an energy transition. We would ditch our clanky old machinery - all the smokestacks and pollution and internal combustion engines - trading them for sleek cars that, if not flying, would at least be electric, powered by cleaner, gentler and quieter forms of energy, like wind and solar."
The Information Age has arrived as AI, the digital cloud, remote work and a mass migration from the material world into cyberspace. Earlier expectations imagined robots and AI replacing noisy machinery and enabling leisure while enabling an energy transition to electric vehicles and renewable power. In practice, AI is widespread: it corrects spelling, aids research, diagnoses illnesses and provides some counseling, yet it also displaces jobs, injects unintended language, generates banal content and plagiarizes creative work. The clean(er) energy transition has coincided with these technological changes; coal-burning for power generation has been declining since 2007.
Read at High Country News
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