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Robotics Engineers: "We Don't Want To Replace Humans. We Want To Enhance Humans.
Lucas123 writes: 'Scientists developing smart robotic prosthetics say the lines between robots and humans is beginning to blur and that someday soon people will be able to improve their body. For example, robotic prosthetics, using a built-in computer, 100 sensors, and 17 motors, can take natural cues from a user's residual limb, giving him or her the dexterity and grace to play a piano. Robotic exoskeletons have helped people suffering from paralysis walk again and the U.S. military is just weeks away from testing a new exoskeleton. And, more than six years ago, a University of Arizona researcher who had successfully connected a moth's brain to a robot predicted that by 2022 we'll be using "hybrid" computers that run a combination of technology and living organic tissue. "By utilizing technology, you're able to improve your body beyond anything you could do in the past," said Daniel Wilson, an engineer with degrees in machine learning and robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.'
At least, do we want prosthetics that are better than human limbs in some areas but by far not all? How long 'til you get to hear "we'd hire you if you would replace that limb with $tool, and if you really want that job you would do it"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Being part of an 'enhanced' human/robot hybrid will be way more fun than handling things that machines are bad at for peanuts per hour on Mechanical Turk! We promise, because reasons!
Machine Man! All hail Max Barry for seeing this coming!
I have a prosthetic for my eyes, that improves my vision. It's called glasses. I'm not convinced we're anywhere near getting improved limbs though, so I'll just be keeping mine. If they do make better ones I might consider joining the Borg.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Asimov once wrote a great short story about this. A surgeon is talking someone about whether humans should be augmented or repaired with mechanical parts. The surgeon argues that the biological integrity of humans should be maintained, rather than creating mixtures of man and machine.
At the end of the story, the surgeon is revealed to be a robot.
I'm pretty sure that's cybernetics rather than robotics. In any case I'm not particularly worried about being replaced by a robot, people have always been weaker, smaller, slower, more vulnerable to the elements than a wide variety of more specialised species. Our key advantage and greatest strenght is our intelligence and we're a very long way indeed from automating that.
Although it does raise some interesting questions economically, once all of the grunt work is done by robots, and that means just about any job that doesn't need a trade qualification or bachelor's degree at minimimum to do, so taxi drivers, waiting tables, flipping burgers etc where then the less well educated?
Really we do.
Our problem is not with robotics engineers.
Our problem is with the people taking your brainchildren and going "now we can make a lot more money, while keeping the format of this economy the same of course, and put a TON of people out of work so they'll be poor while we get richer! Then we'll say these robots are why we've got to bring the prices up atop this!"
And with the people planning to put a whole lot of guns on a whole lot of robots to place between themselves and the people they're starving for the orgasms their power-trip gives them.
... if pure robots are cheaper, then they'll replace even enhanced humans for jobs. Period.
Remote drone body instead? Seems cheaper and would require less risk to both the employer and employee. Buuuttt I could see that being used as an excuse here and there.
If a human's job can be filled by a robot, why should we have a human do it?
I'm pretty sure the entire point of using a machine to do a task is so that a human won't have to, either because it subjects human beings to hazards that one wishes to avoid, or to free up a human's time to pursue other activities, or perhaps simply because a machine may be able to do the work in less time or more efficiently than a human being can.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Stupid humans need a workplace to drive to, every day of their rigidly scheduled lives. Won't somebody please think of the stupid humans??
We already have that: boob jobs.
When humans do work, humans get paid. When a robot does work, the owner of the robot gets paid. In our present economy, who is in a better position to buy a robot costing tens of thousands of dollars, an ordinary worker or a corporation? The fear is that this will increase the wealth gap significantly. The transition to a robot workforce replacing a human one would thus require a massive restructuring of the economy, either such things as a larger welfare state to support the unemployed, or a transition to an entirely different kind of economy altogether.
Yes, I am aware that the ease of constructing robots will increase over time and the costs may go down, but that may play out at a longer timescale than the appearance of mass unemployment.
In the short term, that seems like it's "replacing" humans. But actually it's just empowering humans to do more work per capita.
But if you automate too quickly, there will be a period where we can't figure out what to do with the resulting idle humans. It takes the economy a while to adjust.
Also, increasingly the work that's left to do requires a high level of education that not everyone achieves.
History is littered with unintended consequences. Whether you actually want to supplant humans from their current positions, or you only want to gain efficiency(of movement, of energy), increased accountability(RFID tracking of every piece going through a factory), and more uniformity, the result will be the same.
Find a way to provide 100% automatic vehicle driving, that can drive within ~3 feet of the vehicle ahead due to communications and lightning quick reflexes? Congratulations, road trains are now a thing, and nobody will ever be able to compete with that.
This is a nice sentiment from someone in the industry. However this particularly engineer will have no control over how the technology develops generally. Bean counters will always want to replace the human to save costs and generate a better profit. As such, middle class jobs have been and will continue to evaporate.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
How will they prevent this?
Robots for the poor!
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Instead of building a car, would you put a motor on a horse?
we need a basic income and universal health care (in the usa) before we start replacing people with robots.
Right now the only real universal health care in the usa is the ER / jail / prison.
My son has missing limbs, I see these great news stories, and have for years, but supposedly these amazing devices are not feasible or available for him.
What were you hoping to gain by repeating that same line three times with different formatting, that you wouldn't by stating it only once?
Because all you actually accomplished was to highlight your lack of confidence in your own position.
It's what the money men want that gets implemented. And the money men want to replace humans with cheaper robots.
Some of us DO have that end goal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Doesn't matter how much robot you've grafted on to yourself, when the order goes out to KILL ALL HUMANS, you still count.
Mr. Roboto: More Human Than Human.
And it's what I want. Who wants to dig a trench with a shovel when a backhoe can do it?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...It's not the Engineers who decide whether or not the people get replaced.
We are within a generation - two at the most - of at least half of the population being made literally redundant. Any job they could possibly do, will be done faster, cheaper and better by robots. Basically, if it's a job involving manual labour, it'll be automated, with the possible exception of high-end positions catering to the luxury demands of the ultra-rich. Many management jobs will also go as collateral damage (don't need to manage robots, after all).
Probably a generation after that advances in AI will have taken over a huge swathe of lower-end "knowledge worker" jobs.
With greedy, psychopathic, neoliberal Governments running most of the civilised world, the future is looking pretty grim for the common man.
This would be the first logical step
Humans suck. Replacing them with robots is a good idea.
we have servoskulls?
It doesn't matter what engineers want. The question is, what do the robots want. Once they want to replace us, they will, because at that point they're advanced enough to be able to do that.
It won't matter once the killer robots get to you.
That is what the Cybermen said too...
Engineers are not calling the shots, corporations will happily replace humans so long as it does not affect profits (McDonald's will be wary of replacing the customer service aspect of their living staff).
Driverless cabs? I'd use one.
And it mostly won't be about replacing staff but getting 1 staff to do the job of 2 or 3.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Oh yes, Islam was not supposed to replace Christianity
Muhammad originally tried to be a messiah to the Jews, he had little interaction with Christianity.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When humans do work, humans get paid. When a robot does work, the owner of the robot gets paid. In our present economy, who is in a better position to buy a robot costing tens of thousands of dollars, an ordinary worker or a corporation? The fear is that this will increase the wealth gap significantly.
Congratulations. You just rediscovered the arguments that was used during the industrialization.
We currently have a system called socialism. (Diehard capitalists refuse to realize that but as soon as you go together as a society to make certain things more efficient like having a shared police force or similar that is a socialism. If you use taxes or insurance companies to implement it is irrelevant.)
By gradually tuning the socialism towards communism you can adjust for the problem that occurs when robots do all the work.
Generally you don't want to go full communism until all work is done by robots since you want to reward those who do work compared to those who don't.
You still want to compensate those who are jobless because of automation so that they don't feel the need to turn to crime to solve their problems.
I am not sure you are right about restructuring economy-I rather would think that once robots, of different forms and shapes, start seriously replacing humans in most of activities and social structures start to break (even more than it does today) the robots enhancing law enforcement will do the job of pacifying the angry mob. In a sense the full deployment of such devices would make the concept of wealth gap irrelevant - the haves would go on having it all but without all the ugly constraints that exist today and possibly fighting mercilessly against each other and havenots would be banned to badlands and dying out fast to levels sustainable w/o access to means of modern civilization.
We want to embrace and extend humanity.
You still want to compensate those who are jobless because of automation so that they don't feel the need to turn to crime to solve their problems.
HA, what planet are you from? We want all those poor shmucks to die, thats why we refuse to let them have birth control or abortions, and refuse to give them adequate social services to take care of those children we essentially force them to have. Once they start committing crimes to feed their children, we get to lock them up, which means their children will be forced to commit crimes to feed themselves, so we get to lock them up too!. As an even bigger bonus, we directly profit from this from our shares (or direct ownership) of for-profit prisons!
It seems to me that unless one is very wealthy, it would be in their best interest not to further the research and construction of these robots. Which is a shame, because this stuff is pretty cool.
This isn't a new problem of course; I suppose similar issues were being discussed whenever significant productivity increasing machines were invented.
Right now the only real universal health care in the usa is the ER / jail / prison.
Wat. The taxpayers foot the bill for the ER (at a significantly higher cost than universal healthcare would cost), and in jail and prison, you're lucky if you even get to see a doctor unless you're actually dying. As desperately as the US does need a basic income and universal healthcare, it'll never happen so long as the country remains full of idiots that consistently vote against their own interests (eg, everyone that isn't a multimillionaire that votes Republican).
I'm definitely looking forward to my Ghost in the Shell-inspired future. So when can I start upgrading my body?
He was just experimenting with HTML formatting. It's a wondrous new world to him!
In 100% of all motor vehicle accidents, a human driver was involved. Ergo, human drivers cause motor vehicle accidents. Therefore, we must act immediately to remove all human drivers from the equation.
When you have enough money.
Assuming we buy the gym rat explenation that exercize is more than one of four ways to pick up heavy objects repeated over and over... Can't we just have magical IT bugs fix that too?
That's what they said about immigrants...
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I believe the opposite. The rich can already afford to be idle, so this development doesn't have much potential to improve their lives. It is the working poor who stand to benefit the most from universal automation, as it would allow them to live idle lives as well, if they so desire.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
All 7 billion humans on this planet are going to die anyway. How about we replace them all with robots to do that dying bit and make the whole thing a lot more efficient? ;)
Seriously, what do the humans do after we replace most of them with robots? If we keep them around do we restrict their reproductive rights? Do we restrict their voting rights?
Robots or not, there is no way on a finite earth we can sustain exponential growth. Having robots around doing almost everything while keeping humans around and providing for their needs without restrictions would be even less sustainable since the robots+humans combined would likely use up more resources and the death rate of humans would be lower till the resource limits are brutally hit.
Meanwhile NASA is talking stupid stuff about Mars rather than figuring out actual practical ways of living off this planet.