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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 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
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.
...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
http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?
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.
Those who ignore sci-fi canon are doomed to live it.
THL phish sticks
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.
Why would you need or want a robot arm that can do that when you can just buy a simple automatic door opener?
Even if it's light enough to hang on drywall without screwing into a stud, anything that moves and exerts force on the drywall is going to work loose eventually-- better to mount it to a stud, even if it's a high-tech robot arm.
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.
Who wants a robot searching through the entire house? What if your girlfriend dropped the keys down her shirt? Let the robot fondle her too many times in search of keys and you may find that she no longer needs *you*!.
Shave me. Don't poke new holes in my face.
I don't even trust other humans to do that for me - and not even (*especially* not even) a barber with a straight razor, no matter how close the shave will be.
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.
You forgot the most important criteria "Identify which of the fertile (or infertile, depending on your preference) girls would be willing to go out with you"... which, if you're using a robot to screen out women based on where they are in their menstrual cycle, is easy to answer.... None of them.
Though a better way to get the kind of woman you're seeking would be to visit a brothel (legal or otherwise...). If all you're looking for is safe sex, it's much better to go to a professional.
I could certainly imagine some kind of hormone detector that can sample the air around the woman (or maybe her breath) could do what you want, but you don't need a robot for that.
"Suddenly, everybody's talking about robots and robotics. ..."
Obviously I'm going to the wrong parties, no one around me is talking about robots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
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.
you do realize the population of the US is only 330 milion currently.
You're talking a very long way off if so.
But when we have robots to do all of the work and everyone is unemployed, we'll all have a lot more time to have sex, so the population will skyrocket.
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We always seemed to be able to find more jobs because we replaced physical labor with mechanical labor, it's different this time. Now we are replacing intelligence. At some point it becomes cheaper to build a new robot to do a job then train a person to do it. Next, before the last 100 years we didn't have an audio global communications network, and the last 40-30 years a massively connected global digital network that made redundant a huge number of people. Productivity cannot stretch to infinity. At some point we have to either pay people to do nothing, or kill off a bunch of people.
" 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.