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.

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.

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%.