Minsky: We Need Robots, People!

I found this article summarizing Dr. Marvin Minsky's talk at a conference darned interesting, particularly the ending. As the population of the earth ages -- and assuming we don't globally warm ourselves into small piles of cooked fat -- who will do the work? Robots. The paucity of new developments in AI in the past 15 or 20 years is attributable, Minsky says, to the disappearance of large private labs and to higher education's shifting emphasis to "practical" classes like entrepreneurship rather than basic science.