AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as a paralegal, data analyst, radiologist, coder or novelist is about to be hacked out from under you. So far, so apocalyptic. But what about the jobs that are primarily embodied? Sous-chef, rehabilitation nurse, plumber, dog-trainer? These are expected to lag behind, awaiting the next generation of robots. But there is an important further question. Who will train these robots? Answer: you will. 

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This is the concept of the arm farm. On an arm farm, practitioners of the aforementioned jobs – chefs, nurses, plumbers etc. – wear Go-pro helmets, pressure-sensitive gloves, even full motion-capture rigs, and do the jobs that the robots will ultimately usurp. Somatic data flows from the sensors: information on force and precision, timing variables, optimal trajectories. Over many thousands of iterations a profile accumulates, amounting to the ideal way to, say, make an omelet. Here we are not just talking spatula proficiency. We’re talking pan-time relative to heat, browning metric, wrist action (tossing, beating) and toaster multitasking. This is the final frontier: handling irregular, deformable materials (otherwise known as food). 

The human traitors paid for this work are called (by the colleagues who would probably do it too if they were offered it) “coffin makers.” Because the........

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