Robots In 2020: Lending a Helping Hand To Humans (And Each Other)

Lashdots writes: In the next five years, robots won't kill us (or drive our cars). But they will get better at helping us do routine tasks—and at helping each other too. Those are some of the predictions Fast Company gleaned from some of the robotics firms on its "most innovative" list, including Anki Robotics, robot-based genetic testing startup Counsyl, and Lockheed Martin, which has demonstrated a pair of unmanned aerial vehicles that work together to fight fires. I'm just waiting for drones that will simultaneously cut my lawn and deter burglars.

Comments

oh, come on, man

[turkeydance]

the burglars will be robots, too.

Minumum Wage will push these sooner

[amxcoder]

With the push for higher minimum wage for low/no skill jobs, I'm sure there will be more focus on robots that can flip burgers and serve up milk shakes. These types of robots are actually possible with todays technology, only they weren't economical, however if you have to pay McD employee's $30K a year, they will make more sense to the restaurant and fast food industry.

Re:Minumum Wage will push these sooner

[TWX]

Machines in every form benefit the owners of the means of production, not the worker that works for someone else. This has been a fact since cottage industry gave way to centralized production at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Machines allow less humans to do more work. That is true of the use of the water-powered forging hammer that replaces a half-dozen men swinging sledge hammers, or of the automated alignment and welding assembly that puts car bodies together without using humans for the bulk of the job.

I'm really surprised that fast food and other low-skill, low-wage work hasn't been replaced by robots already. Companies that sell these products have already figured out exactly how hot the grille and deep-fry oil needs to be, how long the meat needs to be in each and when to flip or remove, and given the crap job that the no-skill worker does of stacking the condiments, a machine probably could apply a slice of lettuce, two slices of tomato, meat, and cheese between two slices of bread to make a hamburger before wrapping it in paper.

Fast food isn't a skill. It doesn't even come close to coffee shop barista, where the customer is already paying a luxury price for a human's touch when making a product that could come out of a machine just about as well. If it costs $200,000 per year to pay employees to work a fast food restaurant, and that cost can be reduced to $60,000 per year by the introduction of a half a million dollars of machinery that will last for a decade, these companies would be nuts to not replace workers with robots.

Re:Minumum Wage will push these sooner

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

With the push for higher minimum wage for low/no skill jobs, I'm sure there will be more focus on robots that can flip burgers and serve up milk shakes.

Oh, please. First you need robots that can do that, second you need people to maintain those machines, third you still need people to do all the other jobs that still have to be done besides flipping burgers and serving shakes. Did you know that most McDonalds shut down every night, everything in the kitchen is taken to the sink to be washed and sanitized, then put back so the morning crew can flip a switch and start serving customers? Did you know that twice a week a huge truck comes by, drops off boxes of food ingredients, and those have to be inventoried and stashed properly so they can be used throughout the week. When that stuff comes, the next promotion that comes around has to be deployed, cardboard cutouts assembled, decor changed, etc. Basically at a corporately-owned McDonalds you are not a burger-flipper. You're a surprisingly nimble meat-bag capable of just about any task that is required to run an establishment about that.

What I'm trying to tell you is that you can automate the cooking of the meat or the dispensing of the shake but you're not removing any significant amount of man-power to the place. You might be able to shave one or two people during the weekday lunch shifts, but until they start making full on androids you're nowhere near minimum-wage motivated store automation.

What your'e really going to see is a higher-priced burger. I say: "Bring it!"

Re:Minumum Wage will push these sooner

[CrimsonAvenger]

Machines in every form benefit the owners of the means of production, not the worker that works for someone else.

Is that why the average worker is no better off today than they were in 1800?

Damn, you beat me to it!

It's fascinating watching supposedly educated people pining for the good old days when Real Men (tm) were mostly peasants. Sorry guys, automation is what makes things like cars, computers, TVs, refrigerators, fresh fruit in winter, etc. possible....

Re:Minumum Wage will push these sooner

[ranton]

One problem with looking into the future is most people only think of one thing changing at a time. For instance many people though that as buildings became taller, restaurants and other services would need to be built in sky scrapers to provide basic services. They didn't think of potential inventions (such as elevators) that would simply make it easy to travel back and forth between 40 stories. Many of the tasks you describe feel very similar to this issue.

Did you know that most McDonalds shut down every night, everything in the kitchen is taken to the sink to be washed and sanitized, then put back so the morning crew can flip a switch and start serving customers?

Robots will not use the same dishes and utensils that humans use to make food. For instance it isn't like you use a robotic arm to physically flip burgers on a pan, you create a conveyor belt that cooks on both sides at the same time. The machines built to replace humans will not only take into consideration the most efficient way to cook food, but also the most efficient ways to either self-clean or be cleanable by another machine.

Did you know that twice a week a huge truck comes by, drops off boxes of food ingredients, and those have to be inventoried and stashed properly so they can be used throughout the week.

If only there was a major e-commerce retailer that has already been working on using fleets of robots to make loading / unloading products easier. I'm sure this technology will never proliferate to other industries. [/sarcasm>]

When that stuff comes, the next promotion that comes around has to be deployed, cardboard cutouts assembled, decor changed, etc.

Even if you couldn't accomplish this with digital signs / posters / etc, these tasks are done infrequently enough that a small group of human employees could probably service dozens if not hundreds of stores.

What I'm trying to tell you is that you can automate the cooking of the meat or the dispensing of the shake but you're not removing any significant amount of man-power to the place. You might be able to shave one or two people during the weekday lunch shifts, but until they start making full on androids you're nowhere near minimum-wage motivated store automation.

1) Kiosks taking orders. If Walmart self-checkout lines are any indicator, one human operator with six kiosks could probably replace six cashiers.
2) Machines cooking the food. Plenty of machines already help cook food now, but once again I could forsee machines that reduce three line cooks with one line cook and more machinery.
3) Machines packaging the food. Again you will likely need some human intervention, but this also removes a few staff members.
4) Lower number of employees also means a lower number of shift supervisors.

I could easily see a McDonalds crew being cut by half or even 75% with only today's level of technology. The only thing stopping it is the robots are still more expensive than humans. More engineers would certainly have jobs, but probably around the rate of 1 more engineering job per 10-20 crew member jobs lost.

Re:Minumum Wage will push these sooner

[lucien86]

Yeah sure the burger flippers should be trembling in their boots. I work on these kind of robots and a few statistics for you. Humanoid robot base systems will cost (minimum) between about $250,000 to $1 million, service and battery costs are going to be about $20,000 to $50,000 per year. Plus each robot will probably need 1 to 2 highly trained technicians on permanent standby and will have en expected mean time between failures (MTBF) of between about 1 day and 1 week. On doing heavy manual labour that MTBF could fall to between 1 minute and 1 hour. The parts replacement schedule alone will cost as much as most human workers.

The people who AI is most likely to replace first are mid and senior level managers, executives, in some cases CEO's, and certain overpaid professionals.. Ok, and computer programmers, clerical workers, maybe some professional drivers, and maybe some soldiers. No robot can compete (on costs) with a human working for $10 or $15 per hour, or $1 per hour in the developing/third world.

Vacuum robots

[The Grim Reefer]

I got my wife a Roomba vacuum robot 6 or 7 years ago. She admitted to me that at first she thought it was a waste of money. But after using it for a day or two, she changed her mind completely. We set it up to clean the first floor of our house at night. We just got a Neato BotVac series one this week. It's a big improvement over the older Roomba.We still run the upright vacuum cleaner every couple of weeks. But in a house with three large dogs, it would be a daily chore w/o the robot vacuums. It's not Rosie the robot, but they are a time saver for us.

I think my daughter was a little disappointed. She was expecting to be able to have a conversation with the Roomba one. Or at least R2D2 level of responses.

Re:Vacuum robots

[wonkey_monkey]

I got my wife, a Roomba vacuum robot, 6 or 7 years ago.

My hobby: repunctuation.

Public acceptance

[DrYak]

I'm really surprised that fast food and other low-skill, low-wage work hasn't been replaced by robots already. {...} Fast food isn't a skill. It doesn't even come close to coffee shop barista {...} If it costs $200,000 per year to pay employees to work a fast food restaurant, and that cost can be reduced to $60,000 per year by the introduction of a half a million dollars of machinery that will last for a decade, these companies would be nuts to not replace workers with robots.

Indeed. But on the other hand, we human tend to be social being. And we tend to appreciate contact with other humans.
Some older people would insist that they *definitely* need to interact with a human being taking order at the cash register, and they *definitely* need to see humans flipping burger in the kitchen behind.
They would find alienating to pass order to a machine and have their burger prepared by a assembly-line machine.
And add to that, that people will be down in the streets protesting that they are loosing jobs, and you can see why fast-food chains are a bit reluctant to start automate everything.

But old people get older, and newer younger generations come. And our current generation, is way too much self-absorbed to care. We are too much busy tweeting and posting on facebook while in line to even care if our orders are taken by an automat or a real person : it's just a distraction delaying us from typing a reply to a youtube comment on the smartphone.

The barriers to accelerating fast-food with assembly-line like robots isn't a technical one, but a sociological one. The fast-food companies needed that the population gets used to it.