While AI has been proven to be much more difficult than Turing and other early pioneers believed, its inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that Herbert Simon was probably right when he wrote in 1956 “machines will be capable … of doing any work a man can do.” I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do. Bill Joy’s question deserves therefore not to be ignored: does the future need us? By … Continue reading Moshe Y. Vardi