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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.'"
Not notice them? You mean all the unemployed?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
"I came here with a simple dream. A dream of killing all humans." B.B. Rodriguez
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
My Roomba ordered me to get off my "lazy human ass" and vacuum the house myself.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Why does the western world have such a preoccupation about robots always turning into killing machines that will try to destroy the entire human race?
Isnt it starting to get a bit cliche these days?
dogs are our insurance against a robot uprising.
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.
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?
...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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm 37 and robots still can't perform the simple things I wanted them to do when I was 4
A robotic arm that can attach to drywall and is light enough to not need drywall anchors or drill into a stud. It is mounted above and/or behind the door. With the push of a remote, it opens/closes the door. I shouldn't have to replace the whole damn door. The robotic arm should adapt to a traditional door.
Robot, find my keys. No, the keys do not have an RFID tag. I know you don't know where they are right now. Systematically search for them without trampling pets or trashing my shit.
Shave me. Don't poke new holes in my face. No, I didn't need to shave when I was 4. Was just thinking about the future.
Scan every girl in the club. Breakdown the odds each girl could get pregnant tonight. Weed out those menstruating. OK, yeah, I definitely did not think about that when I was in 4. The tricorder fantasies came later.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
You will certainly notice the robot uprising the next time you try to apply for a low-skill job that a robot can do. That's a lot of jobs. The only ones that are still done by humans are domestic service occupations. A robot can't fix your toilet yet. However, this being a down economy, any average person has little money and does everything he can to avoid buying any services, by, for instance, fixing the toilet himself, cleaning the house himself, and mowing his own lawn after fixing his own lawnmower. I predict repairmen will be in less demand as the depression progresses, and the final occupations exclusive to humans will nearly disappear.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?
Dear robots,
Please take out the above human first.
Thank You
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"Suddenly, everybody's talking about robots and robotics. ..."
Obviously I'm going to the wrong parties, no one around me is talking about robots.
but I can't think of a solution that isn't socialism and wealth redistribution (since robots basically do away with 90% of the work ppl were doing), and everytime you suggest that you get shouted down with "Marxist!".... :(
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This is the whole point of the article. Robotics are taking over from humans, most of us are becoming redundant, and we're blind to the very real social changes because they don't look like Twiki from Buck Rodgers.
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Because we have seen a backlash against the phone / Tablet / PC industry? Electronics are now use and chuck and are even designed with that in mind (non user replaceable batteries for one).
Also 3d printing requires resources and is only efficient on single print runs. It will remain quite a bit cheaper for a long time yet before 3d printing competes with mass production.
I have a neato robot vacuum. It is on literally every day. If you offered me something that could be the robo-maid from the jetsons I don't know how much I would spend on it but it would be quite a lot. Oh the dream of a machine that would clean the kitchen and change my bed sheets for me!!!!!
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
So we do end up with people pulling 60-80+ weeks while other don't work at all. And we need to make so people don't lose food stamps, SSI, SSDI, ECT by working a little to much but no where near what they can get my not working at all. Also we don't people who say I will just take the basic and not kill my self pulling the 80+ work week.
Just breed an army of smart apes to counter them.
Table-ized A.I.
Robots are yesterday's news.
We grow human tissues and organs here at the UW.
We are where the surgery robot in Ender's Game came from.
Others try.
We DO.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Parent needs to be modded +5. The more the robots take over, the more people will be unemployed, and as robots get better and better at automating more complex tasks there's going to be very little labor for actual humans to do. This will be wonderful - once we're able to transition from the social and economic systems that rely on people working. That transition probably will not be pretty.
Maybe along the lines of "Turing test"?
Can we please stop treating the Roomba as a harbinger of the inevitable robot apocalypse?
It's just about the most trivial "robot" you can imagine, it's been around for over a decade, and in that time, there hasn't been a single new development in the "robotic home automation" market that it was supposed to usher in.
It's just a silly gimmick - it does a good enough job of vacuuming your Cheetos crumbs (though not nearly as well as getting off your ass for 5 minutes would), and that's about it.
sic transit gloria mundi
" The more the robots take over, the more people will be unemployed"
Sigh. This just isn't how the economy or unemployment works. In economic terms, robots are simply one type of capital. Technology has been improving the efficiency of capital essentially for ever. Its true that if you increase your capital, you need less labour to achieve a given result. But since the labour is available, what we do instead is combine it with the now greater capital to make *more*, thus making us richer.
Your assumptions are also flawed. First, companies own most of the capital not individuals. Secondly you're assuming that you need to
combine that capital with HUMAN labor for it to work. What happens when a company can combine their capital with 100% robotic labor.
If I can buy 100 robots and make and sell widgets all by myself what incentive do I have to employ human labor at all?
Yes, robots can be considered capital but it's naive to assume that they can't also be counted on the labor side.
At least half of the military robots are built by iRobot. They make plenty of money working for the government, which is how they had the extra capital to develop the Roomba. iRobot is "smarter" than Boston Dynamics because they had the business acumen to see that their R&D could also be used for consumer products.
My guess is that Google didn't buy iRobot because they are building small/clever/cute robots, while BD is making large, scary, terminator style bots. BD wants to make the soldier of the future, iRobot wants to make R2D2.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.