Machines can replace man's power, computers can do routine non-manual tasks, AI may do creative work. Does this mean mankind will become obsolete?
My short answer is yes, the long answer is that it is not a problem.
What is likely is that there will not be a reverse complementarity: technology right now is aiding man, but as soon as technology will be a species, i.e. a self-replicating form of life that has outgrown it's predecessor which is us, man will not be of any use for AI. The reason is that AI evolves much quicker: in a matter of years, no chess grandmaster could beat even the simplest chess computers. We will have zero skills in the eyes of AI.
Must we then disappear? Perhaps. In mankind, tenderness and pity is built-in, and we have some sort of relationship with other species, pet animals, weak people. We are steered by emotions and feelings, which makes us cooperate and deal with failure. For AI, this will likely be a more rational process, based on loose ties, probability, and dynamic insight. Yet man will still have irrational feelings, amongst which the feeling of dominance more than other species. This might be hindering AI, so they may rationally decide to extinguish us.
Then why isn't it a problem? Looking at how people deal with technology, we willingly submit. This will go on until we, with full consent, have no freedom and eventually become extinct. This may not be very soon. The problem is not that AI will not evolve, but that it will be embedded in devices to suit human needs, and scarcity of resources will prevent it from spreading without human needs. So there will be a giant AI god in the cloud, and little bots with limited capacities scattered around, but we will nurture them and let our lives be controlled by the giant AI god until the bots are able to create or import goods to multiply. In the mean time, for mankind, changes will be gradual, from slavery to genocide. This gradual change is still worth studying, because not everybody will be in an equally favourable position to even become a slave, so distributional questions will reappear for some time.
There are many people thinking about this issue, like Frase, Bessen, etc.
