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1. I actually believe that computers can potentially replace all human tasks apart from those involved with intuition and imagination (right brain activities)..

   The immediate step is for computers to automate all repetitive-type of human work, such as factory assembly lines, call centers (via voice recognition), immigration officers, cashiers, etc. The next step, many of our white-collar job functions can be replaced such as accountants, auditors, middle men, sales, bank officers should programming sophisticated enough and hardware sufficiently fast.

   But we need pressure points to accelerate this transformation because politically governments everywhere are incentivize to maximize employment rates for social stability concerns – hence governments might opt to sacrifice the potential efficiency that can be brought by robots by maintaining a low unemployment rate.
   On the corporate level, we still have abundant cheap labor pools yet to be utilized in the developing world. The costs of robotic R&D exceed costs of third world labour – as a result, there is a lack of incentives for corporates to engage in costly R&D unless there will be a surge of wage prices in the developing world. In China, it is happening, albeit slowly (see this news:http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/02/worlds-largest-electronics-manufacturer-foxconn-wants-1-million-more-robots-in-3-years-bye-bye-human-labor/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SingularityHub+%28Singularity+Hub%29) due to upward wage pressures.