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Robot Sales Are Exploding
Roland Piquepaille writes "The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) just released its 2003 World Robotics survey. The original press release by UNECE has 15 pages in PDF format, while the full report represents 380 pages. Here are the three essential findings: robot orders in first half of 2003 were up by 26% to the highest level ever recorded; worldwide growth in the period 2003-2006 will reach an average annual rate of 7.4%; and household robots are starting to take off. "It is projected that sales of all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) in the period 2003-2006 can reach some 638,000 units."
This overview contains more details including a chart showing the growth of domestic robots for the period 2003-2006."
Dollars to donuts these robots aren't coming ThreeLaws-equipped.
I'm not here to make personal sex bots or anything. If anything I hope to become a miner or an explorer through my machines. Why are people so reluctant to acknowledge the impending future where we face critical economic realities when we lose most of the rote labor industries to robots?
Are there any conferences besides futurists ones advocating policy research into this?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I had a chemistry professor (Prof. Lipschitz, not sure on spelling anymore) at Purdue during Freshman Engineering that would bring us a different article about a different idiot every friday about someone who had injured themselves masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. But not just any vacuum cleaner-- he managed to find a different incident every week involving the Hoover Dustette. And not just any articles, either-- they had to be from a reliable medical journal. The excuses were hilarious: "I was vacuuming in my bathrobe and fell on top of the vacuum and the robe came undone," etc...
We, of course, all thought it was just his twisted sense of humor. However, at the end of the year, the big lesson was "As engineers, you have to always take into account the unexpected uses of your product."
You see, other people were using other vacuum cleaners for self-gratification successfully, but the Hoover Dustette had an intake fan within only a few inches of the nozzle. Not a good design if you're gonna stick your bits in it.
Fitness for purpose aside, the point is that there are apparently a large number of people using their vacuum cleaners for exactly that.
This is important to think about - robots and other means of automation will only continue to get cheaper, better, and more versatile.
There are a number of jobs out there where no matter how much or how little you pay people, at some point, a machine will be able to do the job better and cheaper.
Considering that there are a large number of people in the US alone that work in simple labor and service jobs, jobs that are probably the most vunerable to automation, what happens when those jobs disappear? Not just a few jobs here and there - but when automation is good enough that pretty much those entire job fields disappear. Currently they're like the jobs of last resort - what's left?
If that occured in the current society, you'd have a sudden huge jump in unemployment filings, suddenly large amounts of people jobless - often with entire areas having their main sources of employment disappear entirely. These would be people with not a lot of job skills, and little opportunities for them to work. What would be done if millions of people were out of work and had no job prospects? There's not enough money available for a safety net for all of them, and there continues to be efforts to reduce that safety net. Do those of us in higher up jobs that are not (yet) vunerable to automation just let them suffer? Think about the chain of damage on the current capitalism system, when that entire segment of the population is lacking the money to purchase anything. Reduced sales all around, thus people being laid off as not needed, more unemployment claims and less purchasing power - sounds like a death spiral.
The possibilities for a future with nanotech and strong automation seem to have a lot of possibility, as I can imagine a world that is able to provide for all basic necessities in a comfortable manner without requiring people to work. But bar a wholesale bottom-up rebuilding of society to enable that, I don't expect things would head in that direction - and I don't feel very positive about any other direction that could be taken.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Here's a question I don't see asked often enough on these kind of posts: What stocks should I invest in if I agree with this forecast? Not just the obvious, like Roomba (don't think they're public anyhow). But Intel,VIA,3COM, etc- who will be selling the software and hardware for the upcoming robot revolution?
But robots are getting pretty good at recognizing objects, so there is hope that while mowing the lawn they won't mutilate your pets.
Perhaps they won't mutilate your pet, but it won't be because they recognise them. Vision systems are expensive, and robotic lawnmowers don't have them. They basically have a wire delimiting the perimiter, and the wander inside. I estimated that a huge speed improvement could be had by knowing where in the map the robot is, and always trying to go someplace new (see a few things), but even that wouldn't be cheap.
Building a "sophisticated map of geometry" is impossible with current technology, and certainly isn't the way humans work. Don't you think it would be done if it was easy?
On one co-op work term one of the other students was building a mobile robot for a factory; it would bring parts from one area to another, driving using vision. It's possible, but the thing cost roughly $20k, and we were losing tons of money anyway (it was a research project too).