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Will You Even Notice the Impending Robot Uprising?
An anonymous reader writes "We tend to take things like household appliances and other automation for granted, but as O'Reilly's Mike Loukides puts it: 'The Future Is All Robots. But Will We Even Notice? We've watched the rising interest in robotics for the past few years. It may have started with the birth of FIRST Robotics competitions, continued with the iRobot and the Roomba, and more recently with Google's driverless cars. But in the last few weeks, there has been a big change. Suddenly, everybody's talking about robots and robotics. ... I have no doubt that Google’s robotics team is working on something amazing and mind-blowing. Should they succeed, and should that success become a product, though, whatever they do will almost certainly fade into the woodwork and become part of normal, everyday reality. And robots will remain forever in the future. We might have found Rosie, the Jetsons’ robotic maid, impressive. But the Jetsons didn’t.'"
I take a train to work (and home again) that has no driver. Yet, to a person, everybody disagrees with me that a robot drives me to work.
Too late. Most of the jobs people did 100 years ago are now done by machines, while the machines do the work. It's the machines that actually touch the raw materials and the products.
The baker? Already replaced by someone running a bread-making machine (robot) that bakes 1,000 loaves per hour. How many humans touch that loaf of bread you buy in the grocery store? Approximately zero, and that's why you can buy it for 99. The lumberjack, chopping down trees? Already replaced by the harvester machine, with a human sitting inside, but not actually touching any trees. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker were all replaced decades ago. They all became machine operators, operating machines that result in us walking into the grocery store and seeing 39 different kinds of sandwich bread to choose from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome