Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?

Anonymous writes "Marshall Brain (the guy who started HowStuffWorks) has published an article claiming that robots will take half the jobs in the U.S. by 2050. Some of his predictions: real computer vision systems by 2020, computers with the CPU power and memory of the human brain by 2040, completely robotic fast food restaurants in 2030 (which then unemploy 3.5 million people), etc. It's a pretty astounding article. My question: How many people on /. think he is right (or even close - let's say he's off by 10 or 20 years)? Or is he full of it?"

Comments

Re:What About Instict?

[ray-auch]

In a fly-by-wire aircraft (which is a lot of recent large passenger planes) you already bet it on the computational prowess of machine. It might be (is) several machines with different software comparing/contrasting/voting and monitoring each other, but machine it is - and if it decides the engines won't throttle up, then they won't, no matter how hard the pilot pushes the stick.

Re:What About Instict?

[will_die]

Better not fly on an Airbus.
They are already using computers to limit what the pilot can do.

AI has long way to go and so have robotics

[Neuronerd]

Ok lets look at a number of problems

When can we expect good computer vision? There are lots of progresses in the field. New statistical techniques. Faster algorithms for supervised learning. But still. I guess if you had asked 30 years ago when perceptrons were quite fashionable how long it would take to have real good computer vision you would have gotten the same estimate of 20 years. Doing some work in computer vision I must say that to my knowledge we are still very far from building anything thats real. We are rather at the stage where we discover 2 new problems for each problem solved. Problems are for example: Attention, efficient learning, efficient inference, symbol grounding, categorization. So I guess it will take many more years. Or forever.

What about self repair ? One of the really cool things about humans is that they mostly repair themselves. Our bodys endure constant abuse. Our bodies constantly repair the damage at least over approximately 100 years. A large number of robots would demand constant repairing.

Are robots really cheap? Lets face it people are there. We already have a very high rate of jobless people. Given the right taxation systems these people should be a lot less cheaper than any robot could ever be.

Dont get all of this wrong. Computer Vision and Robotics will improve. But it will improve the same way that tools improved throughout the history of mankind. They slowly get better and more useful. While we find novel ways of using them. And spend our time doing more interesting stuff. Like reading slashdot.

I think I've heard this before.....

[hawkstone]

From Russel and Norvig Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach:

From the beginning, AI researchers were not shy in making predictions of their coming successes. The Following statement by Herbert Simon in 1957 is often quoted:

It is not my aim to surprise or shock you -- but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that can think, that learn, and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until -- in a visible future -- the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which human mind has been applied.

Although one might argue that terms such as "visible future" can be interpreted in various ways, some of Simon's predictions were more concrete. In 1958, he predicted that within 10 years a computer would be chess champion, and an important new mathematical theorem would be proved by machine. Claims such as these turned out to be wildly optimistic.

I remember claims apart from Simon's (can't find the source, sorry) dating back fifty years ago that computers would have human-level intelligence by 2000. The field of AI has been notoriously difficult to predict. Who knows? -- maybe this time someone will be right. But don't bet on it.

What? No Moravec reference?

[alispguru]

How can anyone talk about robots taking over the economy without mentioning Hans Moravec? After all, he's only been doing work in robotic vision and navigaton for the past thirty years or so, and has been on record predicting human-equivalent intelligent machines by 2050 since the mid-1980's.

He's even got a start-up company that wants to manufacture control heads - basketball-sized sensor+computer units that could be used to run forklifts in warehouses.

My personal prediction is that within ten years, we'll see the first automated tractor-trailer truck. It'll have a Moravec-like brain that will run the truck for the 95% of the time the truck is rolling cross-country, and a satellite link for a driver to help direct it for the last 5%.

BS

[jefeweiss]

The cars weren't crap because of the workers. The cars were crap because of the people in charge. The guy who practically invented quality control (Deming) went to Detroit first, to the heads of American car companies. They laughed at him. So he went to Japan (where's he's a hero.)

The average worker on the line didn't have anything to do with that decision. If management had decided to implement quality control they would have gone along with it. The CEOs of the big three automakers were asleep at the switch. It was their screw up that cost the US all those jobs. Deming practically begged them to implement quality control, he was an American, and he wanted American companies to use it. It's one of the big ironies of the whole thing that the resurgence of Japanese manufacturing is largely due to an American. And most Americans have never even heard of him.