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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."
Bite my shiny metal ass!
I think I'll wait until I can get a robot that'll go down to the Gym and exercise on my behalf.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Why do robots have small wheels?
So they can stand closer to the kitchen sink.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Dollars to donuts these robots aren't coming ThreeLaws-equipped.
all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types)
Excellent gloss-over of "other types." It's okay, we know what you were thinking.
The coolest voice ever.
-Robots can work 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week.
-Robots dont form unions.
-Robots give you privacy. If it finds your pr0n collection you dont have to be embarrassed.
-Wages unvariably go up, cost of robots unvariably go down.
-Robots dont do any more mistakes even after a 1000 hour work"day".
-Robots are easy to upgrade.
-No-one is going to disapprove your use of robots.
Robots don't complain about unwanted sexual advances.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Someone should prepare the robots for the day when their jobs go overseas to India.
_______
2B1ASK1
Of course people don't tend to realize that robotics is in use all around them, all the time. A robot is "A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance", or alternately, "a mechanism that can move automatically".
Besides the mechanical aspect necessary for something to be robotic, there is the usual criteria for a useful electronic circuit. It must sense, decide, and act. Even a door-opening device at your local supermarket can do this; it senses that something has entered sensor range, it decides whether the signal is strong enough to warrant opening the door (partly based on its sense of what its function switch is set to) and then decides whether or not to open it. The act stage in this case causes motion, which is what makes it a robot.
While we often hope to see robots become more useful around the house, I believe that it is in major industrial scenarios that they will take off first. This is not a shocking prediction given that this is where they currently enjoy their greatest successes, but I am referring to more autonomous robots than those which currently paint cars and so on. For instance, large earthmoving projects could be carried out with little to no human intervention simply because the problem domain is so simple. Through use of a combination of sensors (including visual/optical, radar, sonar, lidar, and others) a sophisticated map of geometry can be built. If you're not moving very quickly, this can be done with sufficient accuracy using current technology to carry out moderately complicated tasks.
I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring.
The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem. It's bad enough when the jobs leave your country, but only the corporations (and of course the consumers - but they have to have jobs in order to consume!) benefit when the jobs go to robots.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Most recognition algorythems in actual deployment use rule-based heuristics. Most successful chess games still use brute-force logical reasoning.
You see, neural networks are a means to a solution. They are not a solution onto themselves. For each net is only useful for one task at a time. For certain recognition tasks, they are brilliant. But only if, for instance, you need something to recognize a "C" note.
What eludes us still is how the networks commnicate with each other to produce what we call conciousness. And NO, it's not just a matter of wrapping a bunch of smaller nets together with a larger one.
I can't give you an answer what the ulitimate solution is. No one knows.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
yeah but at least we'll have lots of music to listen to.
Oh. I thought you said our bodies would be kept in iPods.
Robots dont form unions.
Yet.
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."
This is VERY optimistic! First of all, most of the above statements rely on a lack of AI.
Allow me to make a list:
- Humans cannot be remotely controlled through some software security flaw and home network.
- Humans don't lock up, restart or mysteriously crash (often)
- Humans often can do what you want, not just precisely what you asked them to do
- Humans who find your p0rn collection and are later interrogated by your spouse know when to lie to save their job
- Humans can provide intelligent companionship
Of course, all of the above can be negated by AI but then you are back to losing most of your advantages above.
Although I would generally agree on the economic benefits of robots, I didn't want to let you go over the edge!
Come play Moral Decay!
The task manager for humans is also dreadful. They spend at least 1/3 of the time sleeping, and take so long to process an instruction that they need to be told what to do again and again and again. Cripes, I sometimes have to remind them in the MIDDLE of a task what they are supposed to do.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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?
Well, you can find sex robots at www.realdoll.com. Kinda. Not really.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Forget the lawn mowing robots, we should be genetically engineering new breeds of animals to take care of these chores for us.
Imagine birds that are instinctively programmed to pick up trash. We have plenty of squirrels around, so why not enlist them to rake our yards? Don't get me started on the rodents (think giant turbines).
Animals in cities have way too much time on their hands and are always causing problems by flying|crapping|shitting on everyone else. It's high time they started pulling their own weight in the world.
If things get out of hand and the animals evolve beyond our ability to control them, *then* we can start thinking about robot exterminators.
I think I'll wait until I can get a robot that'll go down. :-)
It's not a troll. Seriously. It was Professor Lipschitz or Lipshitz or some variation on that-- no idea if he was tenured or not. It was my freshman year, and I *believe* it was first semester, making it Chem 124 (the honors chemistry for freshman engineers-- biggest mistake I ever made taking honors for a class unrelated to my core CmpE studies) in fall of 1995.
I know this is only going to make you doubt me further-- I'd give you his full name and a definite semester/year/class, but I'm on a 2-week business trip out of town and can't get to my old notes at home to check for you.
He had an interest in asteroids as well, and was always bringing us images and videos of that stuff, despite it being a chemistry class.
I *believe* it was this guy, as the face matches up roughly with my memory, but it's been 8 years and he looks to have lost some weight. Email him and ask him about the Hoover Dustette.
Even better, here is a link indicating at least a few of these incidents as having appeared in the British Medical Journal.
I couldn't make this shit up.