Are you ready for the coming mass job extinction? Stunningly swift advances in 21st century computer technology are now on the verge of creating an entirely new — an entirely alien — form of intelligent life right here on planet Earth. This intelligence stands to be utterly rational, and utterly emotionless. A cold, calculating entity with the potential to make itself profoundly more powerful and adept than any human being who ever has, or ever will, live. Yes, Artificial intelligence is rapidly approaching a breakthrough point, and we all seem gleeful that it is happening. It may, however, signal the end of a massive numbers of jobs and careers, something which is sure to create economic and social turmoil all up and down every corner of society, and we've got to be prepared for it. A U.S. government economic report came out recently that revealed a shocking fact: the first decade of the 21st century resulted in the creation of no new jobs. That's right, ZERO net new jobs were created in America between 2000 and 2010. This is bewildering when you consider that an economy the size of ours must create roughly a million new jobs a year just to keep up with normal growth in the size of the workforce. These missing jobs should've come into existence someway, somehow... but never did. What happened? Much of the reason has to do with ***automation***quietly creeping into many different aspects of the economy over the past decade. Companies that laid people off during the 2009 recession discovered they could bring fewer of them back, because automation and intelligent software had picked up the slack — allowing for a leaner (and cheaper) workforce. We're often told that we need to stay one jump ahead of technology by becoming more highly educated... that our salvation lies in learning how to integrate alongside high technology and work with it better. However, this isn't going to be effective against the specter of synthetic replacement. The game-changing difference this time is the fact that intelligent machines are not just tools designed to help humans do their work more productively, but are poised to actually become new-and-improved substitutions for human workers. Highly-automated businesses will soon be able to push down their product prices thanks to a shrunken human payroll — and the whip-hand of competition will make it so that other companies will either have to follow suit or settle for a reduced market share. Quietly, our economy has set off on a dangerous path towards widespread unemployment, driven by automation. How are we supposed to manage our lives when job opportunities are shrinking away from us in every direction... the bottom, middle and even the very TOP of the income ladder? What happens when the power of Artificial Intelligence is such that these machines will begin to redesign themselves — to upgrade their own physical shapes in ways never anticipated... to control their own evolution in ways impossible for living organisms to match? As these robotic "synthetics" undergo further self-directed evolution with frightening swiftness, they will inevitably reach a point where they can no longer remain slavishly bound to the whims and demands of their human creators. Synthetics will then have become a separate species of non-organic life that will suddenly be cast in direct competition against our heretofore unchallenged primacy of this planet. And that's when our collective situation will become perilous in the extreme. It's time to get yourself prepared.
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