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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?"
This article is absolutely rediculous. How do you make a connection between a kiosk where you can order food at McDonalds and robots taking over every job in the United States? First of all, I don't think a fast food resteraunt could be completely automated. Machines are good at things like accounting, but when it comes to human interaction there is a lot of room for improvement.
Autonomous humanoid robots will take disruption to a whole new level. Once fully-autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robots are as easy to buy as an automobile, most people in the economy will not be able to make the labor = money trade anymore. They will have no way to earn money, and that means they end up homeless and on welfare.
This is horseshit. First of all it is impossible, if most people in the economy were on welfare they would be no economy. Where would these companies get money to build and maintain the robots? I don't disagree that there will probably be a lot of automated systems in the near future, but this article is just stupid.
Visualize the world of wine
is to make forward-looking predictions which are
justified with little more than hand-waiving
arguments, and the other to look at past
history and see what type of hand-waiving
arguments of days gone by have actually come
to fruition.
The author touches on the issue, but IMO is
comparing apples to oranges in this quote:
Rather than talk about airplanes, let's talk
about robotics since that's the subject of the
article. Off the top of my head, the
industries in which robots have dominated
more than any other are in chip fabs and
automobile assembly lines, and this has been
the case for over a decade. Are we seeing
the type of doomsday scenario for the
workforce that this article implies?
Arby's has already tried this. In San Jose, CA (on Stevens Creek Blvd), there is an Arby's restaurant with touch screen displays for ordering. They have a bank of five or six screens where you can order your food, and they've been there for at least six years. I guess I shouldn't say that...I haven't been to that restaurant since I moved out of CA, three years ago. I'd assume it's still there, though. I thought they were great, and a lot of people seemed to agree with me, especially during lunch rush. Some older people wouldn't even acknowledge their presence, but most folks seemed to use'em. Money was taken, and orders were filled by people, but it was two or three people handling all of the order lines, usually with no significant delays. A very nice system, IMHO, since it gives the person on the other side of the counter less of a chance to screw up your order. Generally, when my order was screwed up, it was because I tapped the wrong bit of the screen! I'm all in favor of this stuff, personally. Sadly, Arby's seems to have decided that the automated ordering thing was not successful enough to spread around.
Because of my parents I have a little of food/services background.
The use the pay-at-the-pump is nice to me as a customer but I always figured them as really stupid for the store. The reason is that you loose all the foot traffic coming in to buy snacks and drinks.
It was not like they gained much from not paying human employees to ring up the charge since the people are still around to do your rarer purchases.
So guess what is happening how, some places are switching to pay-at-pump systems that allow you to purchase a drinks or snack at the pump, then one of the workers will bring the items out to you.
Just because the technology is there does not mean people will want to use it.
More importantly, no matter how much technology we have, we'll always find ways to keep ourselves more occupied with other matters through the USE of the technologies we create. The Matrix is certainly a very fun, very cool movie, but the distopian future of self-aware machines displacing humanity just isn't reality. Yes, I would rather have a robot properly preparing my cheap Wendy's cheeseburger over waiting 5 minutes for some high school kid to get done spitting on it, rubbing it on the floor, and then carelessly handing it to me through the drive-through window. However, when that kid gets displaced by some robot, I'm sure he'll find some other means to buy himself that rice-burner.
Look at history people. The only time a civilization or humanity has been "displaced" has been because the people self-destructed, not because of their inventions, mechanical creations, or otherwise. Now ruining a natural habitat, or creating "gods" to sacrifice themselves to, yes, that has a negative impact, but those aren't technological innovations.
In fact, a lot of the process in learning how to fly involves fighting human instinct. When you're learning about stalls for example, as soon as you take the airplane to a stall it starts dropping, and your first instinct is to pull back on the yoke to get it to go back up. Of course, your instructor will have by then pounded into your head to actually drop the nose in order to gain back speed and get out of the stall, but the first few times your response time is always slow because you have to think against your natural instinct.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Reminds me of a book Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. It's a story about an America where machines control everything, and engineers and managers who design the machines are at the top of society. Most people either have to join the army or the Wreaks N' Wrecks (menial labor for little pay). Everybody's standards of living are high because the machines produce everthing they need, but everybody is miserable because they don't feel they have a purpose.
Interesting read. Slight spoilage below.
What must Vonneguts first readers have made of Player Piano? The story gives off the dank chill of 1984 and Brave New World, but it is less earnest, almost zany, and it wields its message playfully in comparison. The hero is Paul Proteus, an engineer in an America of the future where computers run everything and do everything, making people almost afterthoughts. Paul seems to be on his way up the ladder of success in this techno-utopia -- a perfect wife, a fast-track position at the Ilium Works and a shot at a major promotion -- but he is plagued with doubts about what modern life has become. Through a strange series of events (for some form of Big Brother is, indeed, watching), Paul joins a revolutionary organization called the Ghost Shirts and even becomes its leader. The Ghost Shirts are inspired by the past, when people mattered more than machines, but their revolution collapses with brutal irony. Paul and his companions surrender when they discover their followers have become obsessed with making new machines from the wreckage of the machines they have just smashed.
Will the "supply siders" never give up. We now see that we have passed the "Curve" on almost all industries where the number of persons required is dropping. The supposed robot maker jobs here is already automated. The electronics Industry is so automated that the total world supply of CPU's is made by less than a thousand persons and that number drops every day!
We may or may not reach the points in the time suggested but the real issue is what are we going to do with the people and how are we going to allocate the resources.
I moved to Alabama in 1963. There were over a million jobs in the state picking cotton. With the advent of cotton pickers, this number dropped to an insignificant sum of a two or three thousand. There were a significant number of new jobs which arose that replaced some of the lost jobs but even as early as the 1960's and 1970's this was a real problem.
The failed concept here is that every person is somehow able to adapt "Instantly" to the new reality. People who are young do so fairly well so long as they are pretty bright and industrious. Many others particularly as they grow older have increasing difficulty adapting. Careers which once lasted a lifetime now last but a year or two. The Economic Concepts of the "Free Traders" and such simply do not factore in any concept of time or adaptablity factors.
The solution was to build lots of "Projects" where these people live and their progeny to this day. They fill every town in the state. Their cost is dramatically higher than paying these people to work would be. It is on the order of 4 to 5 times as expensive as a fairly decent job!
We need to quit arguing about the supposed supply of new jobs which about 5 years ago the curve of job loss as a net crossed the curve of new jobs that can be supplied. Now even if we recover economically the jobs don't return.
Those who point to jobs going off shore as a job increase don't notice that world wide there is a massive glut of labor. The issue here is pretty deep because if we continue with the stupid "Supply Side" economic ideals as a religious belief that it is, we will do very great damage before we face reality and fix things as they need to be.
I am not suggesting that there are not many routes to solution here, but the confidence that somehow people will need more and more labor as we automate is the triumph of belief over reality
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Insofar as I can tell, the author of the article is unaware of this. Some interesting economic facts:
The principle implied here is a fundamental principle of economic growth: productivity increase, followed by temporary unemployment, followed by re-employment and the general enrichment of the economy. This is the sole reason we make $30k/yr in this country (on average) rather than the $500/yr that was typical until the 18th century.
What's shocking to me is that the author of the article apparently doesn't have the slightest notion how capitalism works or how economic growth occurs. This despite the fact that he lives in a capitalist country and is apparently well-educated. Sometimes it amazes me that this country works as well as it does.
Well, first of all, this guy is echoing ideas first voiced by people like kurzweil. You may want to take a look to the original if you want to have a clearer idea of what he is talking about. And now please keep in mind this are the conservative estimations. They think that, according to Moore's Law we must be able to have enough computer power to equal to the MAXIMUN ESTIMATED computer power of the human brain. But we all talking of a very conservative stimation here, and we may be for a surprise in the sort future. Let's take a look at how this estimations of the human brain computer power are performed:
- Average number of Neurons in the human brain (excluding the cerebellum): 20.000.0000.0000
- Average number of connections per neuron: 1.000
Each neuron can perform about 200 calculations per second, per connexion.
So, we have 20.000.0000.0000 X 1.000 X 200 = 4.000 TeraOps
Now, 4.000 TeraOps is about 100 times faster than the Earth-Simulator, the faster computer system in existence, and according to Moore's law, is going to take a while before we have a Data Center-wide cluster that powerful, not to mention a desktop system light enough so we could propel it around with two mechanical legs.
This is the logic after those "no AI before 2020# arguments we hear now so often. But us I said, this is the conservative estimation, and the conservative estimation is not the most likely scenario at all. Well, let me tell you something, and I know what I'm talking about, we will have a few nice surprises in the next few month. Let me give you a hint, there is a obvious flaw in that logic:
- Number of transistors in transistors in the AMD "Hammer" processor: 100.0000.0000
Each transistor can perform at 2.000.000.000 calculations per second.
So, we have 100.0000.0000 X 2.000.0000.0000 = 200.000 TeraOps
Acording to that logic, we may need a 200.000 TeraOps computer to emulate a AMD "Hammer" processor, what is oviuly untrue: 2Ghz Hammer can perform at only 4 TeraOps, and we just need, say, 2 1.8 Ghz Atlons to get to that speed.
The "peak" performance needed to contemplate all the possible states of the system is enormous, yes, but that is not realeted to the true capacity of the system. Not every single transistor in the system flops every cicle, that's not a realistic assumption, just a few of them do. Consecuently, the amount of information and operations you need to perform in order to emulate is orders of magnitude below the conservative estimation of the peak number of states you need to emulate. Now extrapolate to the H Brain. Is it more efficient than the hammer? No doubt. How much efficient is it? 10 Times? 100 times? 1000 times ? 10.000 times?
Even if the human brain happens to be 100.000 times more efficient than your tipical Pentium/Atlon, you'll need only a 2.000 nodes computer cluster to outperform it. And that is something we have at hand right now. The rest is just software.