Robot Workforce Threatens Education-Intensive Jobs

An anonymous reader writes "For years, robots have been replacing workers in factories as technology has come to grips with high-volume, unskilled labor. An article in Slate makes the case that the robot workforce is poised to move into fields that require significantly more training and education. From the article: 'In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible — they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing — robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can't afford lawyers today. But there's a dark side, too: Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner — and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?'"

Comments

Well

[SleazyRidr]

If you're getting $400/hour for something a machine can do, then you wasted your time in law school and clerking. Computers are getting better, but AI still isn't that good. If a computer is making you obsolete, then it's time for you to step up to the next level, use the computer for what it's good at, use your brain for what it's good at, and come up with a package that's actually worth the $400/hour you want people to pay you.

Re:Well

[Fluffeh]

Some $400 per hour jobs have that salary becuase it is that difficult to do and requires an exceptional person to be able to perform it. Others pay that much because while easy enough, no-one wants to do that job so it is offered with a stupendous salary to make it more attractive.

A few examples of highly paid jobs that could be done by just about anyone with a little training:
- Mine Removal - sure there is training, but the majority of the pay is for the danger, not the expertise required to do the job.
- Drug Running - Okay, not an official job title no doubt, but drug trafficers are payed loads of money to do a really simple job. It is just risky as buggery.

Other highly paid jobs such as working on an Oil Platform or in a Mining Pit may not require a huge range of training and experience, but due to location you might well be apart from friends and family for weeks on end. Recently in Australia there has been a bit of a mining boom in Western Australia. The mining companies are paying insane salaries just to entice people to go work in the middle of the Australian desert.

If your $400 hour job falls into the second bracket and there is indeed now a robot that can do the job, tough luck. Find something else that no-one wants to do :)

Re:Well

[Snotman]

You have a misunderstanding of law. For one, if law was black and white, there would be no need for judges which may be your point. People may miss judges if we went with black/white law because there will be no evolution in law. There are always new issues to litigate and ponder like stem cells, hacking, deep packet inspection, copyright on the internet, robotic rights, clones, artificial intelligence, etc. How does a robot respond to new ideas that are not covered by law? Constitutionalists seem to argue this point frequently as they would prefer the law was black and white and administered the way the authors of the constitution "intended". Robots would suit them nicely, but I am sure they are not prepared for the consequences of living with law that was made centuries ago.

Re:Well

[anagama]

The Law is Black and white anyways... I mean how much more True/False can you get?

Laws are often ambiguous or conflict with each other -- a large purpose of appellate courts is resolving such issues. But setting that aside, even if we were to assume perfect black/white laws, the facts that must be fed to these laws are often gray and very often completely opposed.

Car analogy: Take the simple legal proposition that if you cause a car wreck, you are going to have to pay for the other party's medical expenses caused by your negligence (but not for any conditions not caused by your negligence). At trial, two equally qualified medical experts testify, one stating that the rearendee's neck condition was a direct result of the physical forces of the accident, and the other that the physical forces were too weak to cause any harm, rather, the neck condition is nothing more than the natural progression of injuries suffered ten years ago while skiing. Both doctors explain their opposite positions well and back up their opinions with peer reviewed medical science.

The law itself doesn't answer this question of causation -- it merely creates a framework of liability rules and admissible evidence in which the question of causation can be asked of a jury or a judge. A simple T/F computer program would not be able to make a decision in such a case on any basis other than chance. While a jury might use gut feeling rather than a coin flip to decide the issue, and ultimately that is perhaps much like a decision based on chance, most people would probably object to having their cases decided by dice or the digital equivalent.

self checkouts seems to be on the way out so maybe

[Joe_Dragon]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-grocers-start-bagging-selfserve-checkouts-20110926,0,1600176.story
http://consumerist.com/2011/09/report-fewer-supermarket-shoppers-using-self-checkout-machines.html

so maybe you will see some of this being tried out just to have it fail.

You could recolonize Australia ...

[Krishnoid]

Marshall Brain described two possibilities of the social impact of ubiquitous robots in Manna -- definitely worth a read.

Re:sue

[jhoegl]

Nah, they will move the lawyer jobs to India, then to China, then to some island country....

Whoops, it is already happening. Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)
But anyways, just look at low paying unskilled jobs now.... robots did not take over like the article seems to indicate, nope... instead they went to China, where you work in a building and rent a refrigerator box in another from the same company you work for. It is still cheaper than robots.

Ah, naivety

[mbone]

First, at the high end, I suspect that a $ 400 per hour lawyer with a robot assistant would run rings around a robot lawyer, and that that would be true regardless of the quality of the robot lawyer (as the $ 400 / hour guy would be able to afford a robot assistant of the same quality.

Second, there is something that is not being broached here - who benefits from this ? And what determines that ? Suppose that robots could do all jobs. So, what, everyone, being unemployed, just sits in the dark and starves ? Or, everyone except a few robot owners sits in the dark and starves ? And, how, exactly, would those starving people afford the goods and services being turned out by the robots ? Believing that would happen is naive in the extreme. Doesn't mean what will happen is necessarily going to be good, but it will be different.

Re:Ah, naivety

[Krishnoid]

Marshall Brain came up with a couple scenarios in Manna, an interesting read. People don't sit in the dark and starve, but something comparable.

Re:Ah, naivety

[cheekyjohnson]

So, what, everyone, being unemployed, just sits in the dark and starves ?

I think that would be one of the best times to scrap our money-driven society.

Re:Ah, naivety

[Belial6]

Yes, but when the all automated lawyer can initiate 1000's of lawsuits an hour against the $400/hr lawyer, the $400/hr lawyer is going to be able to review so few of the lawsuits that he might as well not be there.

Re:Cry me a river

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

(CEOs could totally be replaced by machines. Oh yes.)

I was under the impression that most CEOs were already poorly programmed machines. And you can't tell me that Steve Jobs isn't at least part robot.

Re:Cry me a river

[djmurdoch]

2-3 years, not 120. The most an Apple laptop battery lasts is 2-3 years.

This will finally kill capitalism.

[VAElynx]

Since, it can't cope with people not being needed, as even if it'd be economically feasible, it refuses to provide people with anything free. When human work becomes obsolete, and unemployment crosses some threshold, there will be widespread revolts. Compare with industrial revolution and Luddites.

Re:This will finally kill capitalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Butlerian Jihad!!!!!

Re:This will finally kill capitalism.

[khallow]

Since, it can't cope with people not being needed, as even if it'd be economically feasible, it refuses to provide people with anything free. When human work becomes obsolete, and unemployment crosses some threshold, there will be widespread revolts. Compare with industrial revolution and Luddites.

Socialism will up against the wall before capitalism because its workers will be more expensive and hence, obsoleted first. I can see several endstates (none of which are mutually exclusive): 1) some degree of rejection of technology, enabling humans to compete for certain jobs, 2) improving humans so that they can compete with the new robotics (this probably would entail a merging of human and machine), or 3) we find that there are comparative advantages to human labor that don't go away.

Re:This will finally kill capitalism.

[Antisyzygy]

The Roman Empire outlawed certain types of machines to protect laborers.

Re:What? Why is the level of education important?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

It used to be that education was the way to "survive and adapt". If that changes we'll have to come up with something to substitute for it.

Re:sue

[rabtech]

Nah, they will move the lawyer jobs to India, then to China, then to some island country....

Whoops, it is already happening. Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)
But anyways, just look at low paying unskilled jobs now.... robots did not take over like the article seems to indicate, nope... instead they went to China, where you work in a building and rent a refrigerator box in another from the same company you work for. It is still cheaper than robots.

This is only true while labor is really cheap. There are a huge number of goods you can make in the US or China at basically the same cost but in China you pay pennies to manual laborers, in the US you program robots to do it. That is happening in China right now as Foxconn is investing in robots due to rises in Chinese labor rates.

Granted there are some new jobs overseeing the robots, programming them, etc but overall the number of warm bodies required per unit of economic output will continue to go down over time.

We will eventually need to shift to a shorter work-week for the same relative pay or we'll need to find new areas for expansion in space. The alternative is to jump back to feudalism prior to the black death when labor was cheap and most people worked as serfs barely scratching out a living. I would point out that the black death brought about a huge increase in labor mobility as there weren't enough hands to till the fields; people migrated (including illegally) to work for new lords that offered better benefits and pay. I really hope we can avoid that fate this time around (massive death via war or disease required to change the status quo).

Sabot

[confused one]

Throw your sabot at the computer

Re:The doctor bot better be better then watson

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Whoah... one of the prototypes is posting on Slashdot!

completely, utterly, tragically, wrong

[decora]

this is not 'buggy whip manufacturers'. this is mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale. there is no 'automobile industry' to replace the "buggy whip industry" in 2011, there is just a yawning, gaping void. once you automate automation itself, there is nothing to go on to. people cannot afford to go back to college a 2nd or 3rd time and get retrained, owing $40,000 in loans, and then, 3 years later, have to go back again and get re-retrained. computer science graduates are a dime a dozen, and a bunch of them are serving lattes and saying 'thank you for calling Verizon how can i help you'.

the middle east and spain and other areas of the world are full of highly educated, highly trained youth with no jobs and no money. they are trying to immigrate, alot of them cant. they just sit there. no work experience, no opportunity, no nothing. its like the people who run society would prefer that they simply ceased to exist. "oh but they simply arent willing to work" .. .yes, they arent willing to work as prostitutes or slaves. Dubai is a perfect example. half the people are prostitutes and slaves who die by the dozen in construction projects, the rest are over stuffed, well fed man-children living in a fake economic bubble that is set to burst any time.

it is echoes of the early 1900s (especially the 10s and the 30s). the only thing we are missing is a world war and mass starvations to prompt some kind of revolution where dogmatists can take power and engage in bizarre social experiements like bolshevism or maoism. if millions of people are starving to death, 'why the hell not, lets get rid of property.. my whole family just died, i dont give a shit, anything is better than the existing system'

people in their ivory towers are the last to understand what is happening in the street.

Re:completely, utterly, tragically, wrong

[Virtual_Raider]

You failed to address the point he made about the automation of automation. What happens when most jobs are replaced by robots designed by robots?

Until we have AI that's as smart as humans, there will be plenty of jobs for humans to do, so long as they get off their butt and don't sit around complaining about how their super-important job actually turned out to be so simple that a computer can do it better. We've been replacing jobs with 'robots' for decades and we still have more people working than we did when we started to do so.

Once we have AI that's as smart as humans, we're fscked. But that's still probably at least a century away.

What you fail to understand is that there may be an opportunity or even a need for people to do intelligence-intensive tasks that can't be automated, but these are much much fewer than there is intelligent and capable people able to perform those jobs. How many designers and engineers do Apple or Samsung or Google need to come up with The Next Big Thing? and how many workers (robotic or otherwise) do they need to materialize those designs?

The number of people keeps rising, if automation takes over all menial tasks in, say, 30 years, there will be close to 11 BILLION people in the planet. Sadly, the vast majority of them will live in infrahuman conditions just like they do now, a ghastly and miserable existence of dispair while they wait for starvation to end their suffering. The kicker is that people in first world countries will soon start to join them by the thousands, then by the millions when there is no menial minimum-wage work available and most creative intelligence-intensive jobs are already taken.

Best case scenario would be to put everyone on welfare, provide food and shelter and let them dedicate themselves to the pursuit of their interests and leisure activities. The problem with that is, well, people. Individuals may make good use of the chance, but individuals don't live isolated from their society, and they will just become a mass of disaffected and resentful people with no hope. Just like it is already happening today in the UK and in the ghettos of the US. And machines are nowhere near taking over low-brow jobs yet.

Another problem is the rabid nationalism and bloodthirsty mood of some of the large economic powers (again UK and US, but throw in China and Russia too). They already know how to incentivate economies by killing surplus population off in random (or resource) wars far from home. Out of sight, out of mind. War is a good way to employ all those restless unemployed "parasites" living off welfare and too lazy to train themselves to do more elaborate jobs that aren't available anyway...[/rant]

Re:Simple

[flaming error]

A machine may be able to interpret the law; what is law, but software?

But, I ask you, can it follow The Three Laws?

1) If the facts are against you, argue the law.
2) If the law is against you, argue the facts.
3) If both the law and the facts are against you, attack opposition's character.

been to a library lately?

[decora]

stock & commodities exchanges - tens of thousands of traders out of work

checkout registers - countless cashiers out of work

news aggregators - tens of thousands of journalists out of work

lawyering - tons of laywers from top schools cannot find jobs other than 'document highlighting monkey' paying 12/hour

libraries - people with MLS degrees now say 'oh, reboot it' all day long

book stores - experts in literatue, classic, and modern, now say 'you need to upgrade your firmware' and 'venti or grande'

banks - they replaced mortgage lending clerks with 'robo signing' software .... now, they wiped away several centuries of property law, and accidentally screwed up the entire global economy in the process, but hey. it sure was efficient. and they got bailed out by the taxpayer in the end so.. whatever.

Re:sue

[Synerg1y]

I read some of the article and it appears to be a futurist's ramblings on what s/he thinks robots will do, of course they will go terminator style eventually and kill us all, etc..

1. Please please replace my IT job with a robot, I would love to see it fail, and do nothing about it.
2. The concept of AI is beyond the scope of this article, but I believe the consensus is that it is not truelly achievable meaning... robots will never be able to: emotionally reason, have consciousness, or reproduce short of a factory.

I wouldn't hire a robot lawyer... what if the DA is plea bargaining, what if a bit of social engineering is required? : robotic processor overload.

All in all, I don't feel threatened, if they could take the fast food jobs, then HMMM :)

What Would Lawyers Do?

[McGruber]

"Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner — and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?'"

Sue!

Re:Simple

[im_thatoneguy]

Seriously, technology rarely kills an industry.

Technology hasn't really been competitive with people in the past though. And we'll need less and less people managing said machines. There are already "lights out" factories where a few people prep the factory and it just runs unattended for days/weeks.

Sure you might need a couple people as a failsafe but thats 2 jobs vs 200. Those 198 people you now say are "free" to find other jobs but the costs of goods don't necessarily reduce. Just their old salaries go into say.. 80% capital (factory) and 20% savings.

So you lose 100% of your paycheck but the price of goods only drops by 20%. Amazon has already started knocking out retail jobs around the country (Best Buy, Circuit City etc..) and it takes a lot less man power to run a few warehouses and a website than hundreds of stores. Not to mention a warehouse job is easy to automate down the road and web development gets continually simpler. eCommerce site developers are seeing diminishing returns. At some point it just makes sense to all use one website with different skins.

Re:sue

[OzPeter]

Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)

A few years ago there was a kerfuffle about the transcribing of patient records being outsourced to India (or somewhere) because (I believe) that it broke some regulations about patient confidentiality etc. So how does your system hold up under a regulatory eye, and what protections do the patients have under malpractice etc (assuming that they even know their records are going offshore). Are these doctors in India considered staff of the medical clinic? Or have the clinics using your system washed their collective hands of the issue?
 
I'm not implying that doctors in India are bad, just that patients expect their doctors to be working under the regulatory guidelines of where the clinic is located.

Re:Simple

[HornWumpus]

Let me be the first to call BS on this AC.

He or She has obviously limited experience fixing _anything_. (Hint the bolts are not preloosened like you see on TV.) A robot may be able to switch out a battery pack, but it will be fucked when the battery pack cover bolts are stripped and rusted in. It will destroy the cover and possibly damage itself trying though.

First tasks for robots happened a good 40 years ago. Drilling holes IIRC. Pre CNC, stepper motors etc. Depends on your definition, could have been working loom strings to weave complicate patterns, in which case push back 'first tasks' 200 years.

Re:Simple

[epine]

Seriously, technology rarely kills an industry.

Coitus rarely leads to conception. Asteroids rarely strike planets. I don't think that word means what you think it does. A mortal blow matters every time. For a long time machines only had brawn, speed, or stamina. Things are changing at tremendous speed.

We're already seeing a sharp rise in income disparity in America and similar economies. The displacement is incremental, but potent nevertheless, and recent trends suggest this process is accelerating. No one has a convincing model for what the labour force will look like 50 years from now.

As it stands right now, Gary Kasparov would have trouble defeating a high-end cell phone over the chess board. This is an artificial task. Watson is less so. And so it will go. The word "rarely" answers no pressing question.

Re:Simple

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It answers the pressing question of whether or not you should quit law school right now.

Re:sue

[AK Marc]

But what the people in the US don't understand is that if labor were free, it's still cheaper to ship the raw materials from Cupertino to Shenzhen, manufacture in China, then ship the product back to Cupertino to be sold. Why? Environmental regualtions and such. We are exporting our toxic waste to China by sending out the manufacturing. There's more to cost of manufacture than just assembly, but nobody on Slashdot ever seems to consider such things.

Re:sue

[AK Marc]

What do you do when every task is better done by a robot? One of the reasons we aren't all dead yet is that inefficiency in government is better than efficiency. What do you think the last 3 presidents would have done with infinite resources? Would we be better off or worse off?

Re:sue

[AK Marc]

For one, nobody has ever gotten in HIPAA trouble for improper release of patient data, so worrying about such things is like wearing a helmet in case a satellite lands on you. For another, "authorized" people can have access. That would be the Indian clinic. If HIPAA has an issue with that, they'd have to send someone to Bangalore to check, again, by the time they land, you can fix anything not compliant. As such, I'd assert that they are compliant with the appropriate regulations, and if they aren't, they would never face any penalties for violating the rules.

Environmental pollution and offshoring

[Paul Fernhout]

"We are exporting our toxic waste to China by sending out the manufacturing. There's more to cost of manufacture than just assembly, but nobody on Slashdot ever seems to consider such things."

This is insightful; thanks. This is a major problem with "free trade" agreements, not accounting for externalities.

Re:Environmental pollution and offshoring

[Paul Fernhout]

And supporting oppressive regimes through US foreign policy is then only a problem if you live in Saudi Arabia? (Hint, where were most of the 9/11 hijackers from?)

Also, do you want China's nuclear arsenal to be commanded by someone suffering from growing up with mercury poisoning?

Do you want the next flu epidemic coming from an area of China with peopele whose immune systems have been weakend by pollution?

And do you want US jobs lost while those risks are made more likely?

Also, coudld some future global laws lead to financial claims against the USA somehow for cleanup costs?

Re:Cry me a river

[wisty]

Yeah, you're wrong.

Face it, a representative sample of "the elites" made it there through superior intellect and rationality, not luck, inheritance or chance. "The system" is fundamentally just, fair and meritocratic.

Um, most of that is based on his "touch and feel" assessment of CEOs at dinner parties. He disregards charisma, then talks about how these CEOs seemed to "sparkle" with their overflowing "life force".

I'm sure the average CEO is a little smarter than the average bear. But that doesn't mean they don't have an excess of charisma (and a cynical ability to do whatever it takes to be rewarded), while other smart (but less charismatic / greedy) people don't get so high up the ladder.

One of his main ideas - that people like to dislike and underestimate CEOs just because it makes them feel better) is sound. But the other - CEOs *are* all amazingly smart, because the few he remembers meeting seemed pretty bright (selection bias - he met them at humanist conferences, and recall bias - who would remember a boring guy who talked about efficient capital allocations, and the importance of trustworthy lieutenants?), is not so sound.

article doesn't contain what the /. summary says

[bcrowell]

The article doesn't contain what the /. summary says it contains. The article is actually a come-on for a promised series of blog entries which are supposed to substantiate the claims it makes. The article claims that within about 20 years (i.e., soon enough to "steal your job"), a whole bunch of intellectually demanding professions (including writing magazine articles and doing scientific research) will be automated. It offers no evidence for that claim. Maybe he believes that strong AI is coming within 20 years. Maybe he believes that computers can do these jobs without strong AI. Neither of those predictions seems plausible to me, and since he doesn't give the slightest hint of what he has in mind, there's not much to discuss.

Re:I have always wondered about this

[hedwards]

That's sort of the point. You have to do something with those people that are no longer able to work because their skills aren't in demand. Personally, I don't think either of us would seriously suggest euthanasia for such people, but I get the feeling that there are plenty of folks out there that would be fine with Marge and Jim starving to death in a box.

Re:sue

[Genda]

And tell me what happens when someone finally reduces the size of robots to molecular machines and we can fabricate anything from a car to a steak from raw atomic stock. Then you can manufacture anything anywhere, and the important thing now becomes the molecular recipe for the Lexus, not the Lexus itself. Those anyone can have for the cost of the raw atoms and the electricity required to assemble them. What does that do to the economy? Everything is now priced be how long it takes to make it and some arbitrary value associated with fashion of social desire.

Re:Its far more than cost of labor

[nedlohs]

How is the US doing that exactly?

They have interest rates at 0. They've been QEing like Argentina. They've been running huge budget deficits.

All of those things are supposed to apply downward pressure on a currency. So what exactly do you think the US is doing to manipulate its currency to artificially high levels?

Re:sue

[Cryacin]

On a long enough timescale, the survival rate for everything drops to 0. But what timescale are you talking about? I honestly would be very, very surprised if an intelligence can be garnered to have an "effective" IQ of 1,000,000. I am assuming that you don't understand the concept of a logarithmic scale, and are trying to say that this being will be 10000 times faster than the average. There's a ton of "if's" in there.

I am truly interested in the advances of which you speak, and the reasoning behind a "human equivalent" neural network. Seriously. Remember the Simpson's quote? "See Homer, that stuff in that robot's head is why yours didn't work!" A human brain is a highly complex machine that should not be simply trivialised. Given long enough, sure, but I would be perfectly happy to make a billion dollar bet with you that it won't happen. Name the date, friend.

RUR

[roman_mir]

R.U.R. is a 1920 science fiction play in the Czech language by Karel ÄOEapek. R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots, an English phrase used as the subtitle in the Czech original.[1] It premiered in 1921 and introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole.

- the play was about robots basically taking over the world, not just taking over all productive work, but killing all humans.

We haven't gone too far in our understanding of these issues since the Capeks, have we?

Don't forget - the absolute worst thing that a businessman can do in USA or in any other Western nation is to become an employer, to hire somebody.

Once you hire somebody, you lose your rights. That's because the majority of voters are employees and employers are a minority, so politicians cater to the majority vote, and eventually this destroys the jobs, because hiring becomes prohibitively expensive, not from point of view of just salaries, but from point of view of all of the regulations and rules and all of the litigation that is going to be brought against you as an employer.

There will be no new jobs in USA as long as all of these rules exist, all of the litigation is possible, as long as employees get all of the rights and employers get all of the responsibilities.

So that's why there are fewer and fewer jobs - it's because cost of employment is competition not between workers, but it's competition between workers and capital.

As long as it is cheaper to build a machine to substitute work than to hire and employee, machines will be built.

This is true for everything, from assembly line work to phone answering, to cashiers and eventually to lawyers.

The best thing of-course would be to replace POLITICIANS with robots that at least could follow some set of rules and not only be interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the public good (and public good, as in general welfare, is about maximization of individual liberties and leveling of the playing field, but it's not about giving some more rights than others, it's not about providing special privileges in order to buy votes).

In reality the jobs in USA are disappearing and will continue disappearing not because of automation, but because of the political climate that is aimed at destruction of individual liberties and catering to the collective.

Of-course politicians cater to the collective in public, but in private they cater to a small number of private moneyed interests, which become your REAL owners. Presidents are just actors. Your real owners are a small number of corporations, that became monopolies/oligopolies, who are using this power to get themselves extremely rich by destroying real economy in this society that is dead set on destruction of individual liberties and free market capitalism.

Re:sue

[tehcyder]

Basically, if you're willing to admit that humans are in fact made of matter like the rest of the known universe, there's no fundamental barrier to eventual AI of some sort.

E=mc^2, so there's no "fundamental reason" why a big enough nuclear explosion can't spontaneously turn into a fluffy pink unicorn.