The original note, as written at the time
How about this for a future, a more harmonious future with AI and robots, a future with machines? It is likely that we could offset all the dystopian fears we have about our future with AI. Or in fact, late AI, a future where we are more in touch with nature than we’ve ever been. The truth is we all desire to participate in a more natural environment, a more natural feeling environment. And this requires us to often leave the density of the city, or at least if we are within the city, we want to be able to afford the luxury of plant life. A fresh cup of milk, fresh eggs straight from the farm. But you can’t have that and enjoy the density of the city. Now what the AI future could provide for us is that we may be able to in fact create parcels of the planet where each one of us can have a good old fashioned home. What I have in mind is a farmhouse of sorts, each man with a lush green backyard that they can walk into every morning, each man and woman with a view of a beautiful landscape. And of course, robots on the farm ensuring that he can get that cup of fresh milk, that cup of fresh juice, fresh eggs, fresh vegetables, right from their own farm in a way. It could be a greenhouse kind of farm, but what happens is that you’ll be getting fresh products. You’ll have your own personal robot doctor, personal robot farmer, personal robot veterinarian. But I see the robot farmer being quite, quite important. If there is any function for the humanoid robot that has a definite solid place in the future, other than the sex robot or the therapy robot, the humanoid robot is the farmer robot, the gardener robot. Because you would want the gardener to tend to the crops like they are his children.
Ongoing development
How about this for a future — a more harmonious future with AI, a future with machines, so that we could offset the dystopian fears we have about AI with something we would actually want.
The truth is that we all desire to participate in a more natural environment. It does not matter how urban a person is; nobody grows up wanting to live in a sealed box above a road. We want plant life and quiet and a morning that begins outside. But you cannot have that and enjoy the density of the city at the same time, and the trade is presented to us as a law of nature rather than as a consequence of how we build.
What an AI future could provide is that we may be able to create parcels of the planet where each one of us can have a good old fashioned home. A farmhouse, of sorts, with a lush green backyard that a person can walk into every morning, and a view of a landscape rather than a view of another wall.
And the machinery on the farm is what makes it possible. A personal robot farmer, tending the crops as though they were his children, because you would want the person — the thing — looking after the growing to care about the outcome. Fresh milk, fresh eggs, vegetables from your own greenhouse. A robot veterinarian for whatever animals you keep. A robot doctor for you. All of it working quietly in the background while you get on with the part of life that is actually yours.
I am aware this is a fantasy about land, and land is the thing that is most unequally distributed. But look at what we are currently doing. We are producing enormous capability and pointing it at the automation of office work, so that more people can spend more hours indoors, in denser buildings, doing tasks a machine could do alone. That is the same technology aimed in the opposite direction.
The humanoid robot does have a natural place in this world, and it is not the office and it is not the factory. It is outside, in the garden, at the cold frame, in the shed at six in the morning. If we are going to build a machine that behaves like a person, the least we owe it is a job that a person would actually want.