What are humans left to do?

The recent discourses about machine replacing human generally falls into two categories, the fear of the machine and the love of the machine. Yet within the field of artificial intelligence and robotics emerges the idea of 'human in the loop', the defining role of human plays in an increasingly intelligent world of machines. To put it in a more positive note, the question can be asked: in a world where all the work will be taken care of by machine, what are human left to do? The mindset of a retiree is still more comforting that a jobless. In the previous blog I mentioned the idea of predictive program, a piece of intelligent software that provides numerous predictive scenarios of future or event development base of vast data collected or pattern recognition. In effect the predictive program can be applied to the creative field also. Imagine a sculptor or a scriptwriter. When the sculptor is trying to shape a piece of clay into a form, certain he/she has something in mind and works toward shaping the clay into the pre-visualised idea. Yet sometimes the fun of sculpting, or same as scriptwriting or story writing, is to see how the process itself takes on new and unknown direction, to see how's the 'muse' takes the artist. In these operations predictive program may do all forms of shaping work for the screenwriter and sculptor and all they have to do is choosing the 'right' piece in the end. Of course the idea of what is 'right' can falls into many possibilities too. And in the end the artist are left with multiple pieces that are remarkable and desirable, these pieces of work will have to be co-existed in exhibition or the movie, they are all good and surprise endings, giving the viewers or the creators many wonderous experience. In a way this form of creation is much more economical, hitting two birds with one stone. Which get me thinking, in the future, all artists are in fact programmers, twiddling with parameters and data input to see what kind of outputs can be generated from predictive programs.