Ramadan Riots in Brussels

[jordan179]

You can find the whole story at http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/09/ramadan-riots-in-brussels.html, assembled by Baron Bodissey from a number of Belgian sources, but the gist of it is that, in what is becoming an annual tradition, mobs of

Comments

[jordan179]

Interestingly, the Japanese (who have a really big demographic problem) are developing the humaniform robots, and the Germans (who have a much smaller one) the non-humanoid ones. This may not be a pure coincidence.

I do think that android robots will eventually be a reality: we're currently developing the important underlying technologies. Basically, the sf writers of the 1940's and 1950's vastly underestimated the complexity and power of human-style muscles, vision and kinesthetics, so it's taken a lot longer to develop flexible-use robots than they originally envisioned.

I absolutely agree with you that the human population isn't going away. The idea that increased productivity would create mass unemployment first surfaced among the Ancient Romans with the development of the earliest complex cranes and has been repeatedly argues. What actually happens with technological progress is that the population grows per capita richer, not that most of them get poorer and a tiny elite monopolizes the new technologies.

It simply isn't as easy to "monopolize" a whole technology as the doomsayers imagine.