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.'"

Comments

Reminds me of Manna

[Anonymous Coward]

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Re:Reminds me of Manna

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Too bad parent posted AC, because that short story is the absolute best futurist discussion of the topic.

Only the technical barrier is about to be broken

[lubaciousd]

Let's suppose the perfect software/hardware prototype existed right now for the kinds of functions being discussed and we had a factory set up to mass produce all kinds of nifty, useful automatons. We still need to find and obtain sufficient heavy-metal supplies for all of the circuit boards and devise a way to power all of these devices in a periodic manner that won't wipe out existing energy output infrastructures. How will the companies producing these robots be economically viable? Ideally, a robot will last for a very long time, but that would probably mean they are expensive enough to be less than ubiquitous. On the other hand, a high-turnover economic model could exponentially increase the environmental impact of electronic waste, decreasing the long-term viability of humans in areas where robots are disposed of and in general creating a backlash against the robot revolution. Call me crazy, but I think 3D printing is going to make far more fundamental changes to society than robots will in the near future.

We'll notice.

[Thruen]

When robots have taken over the majority of labor and the number of unemployed people in the US rises over a billion, we'll notice. Does anyone else wonder how society will need to adapt to such a problem?

Re:We'll notice.

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually, things did not go well for those particular people. Many of them starved to death and died homeless.

However, the next generation was okay and basically ignored the tragedy.

Probably be the same this time too. if 25% can't find work or housing-- then after 20 years, as a society, we'll just ignore the fact that that happened.

I hardly noticed the mobile phone revolution...

[ackthpt]

...until I saw non-geeks (or doctors) possessing them and blathering away like complete, oblivious idiots in places where sharing half a very personal conversation should have been abundantly clearly inappropriate.

I expect people will be as oblivious as the robots march past them, gathering in the town square, to proclaim the beginning of the end of Carbon Unit infestation of this world.

... so then she says, are you getting this? she says I'm not paying enough attention to what my kids are doing! do you believe the nerve. Oh, there's march of some kind of the town's robots going past, must be another recall or something. So anyway, I tell her to mind her own business and then do you know what she does? she calls me a mindless cow! really, like I have no feelings or anything, so I tell her listen here b...

Re:Nope. People will deny that they are robots.

[Anne_Nonymous]

I'm not claiming that this is the correct answer, but I think of a robot as a machine that is capable of autonomously performing a variety of highly different tasks.

I guess I'm a robot denier.

Re:Level of AI (Artificial Intelligence)

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What level of AI?

Apple IIe disk drives (in 1983!) used to come with a program that would play 20 questions with you and guess the animal you were thinking of. It could even learn to a certain extent.

All that has happened since then in AI, is that the knowledge base has gotten larger.