Will You Even Notice the Impending Robot Uprising? 246
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.'"
Re:I for one (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. People will deny that they are robots. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
most of us already manage the machines working (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:why an uprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who ignore sci-fi canon are doomed to live it.
Re:We'll notice. (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
Re:Nope. People will deny that they are robots. (Score:3, Insightful)
A thermostat is a robot. Automated factories are full of robots, some of which can simply rivet one rivet or whatever, while some can do quite a variety. A tape library certainly contains a robot.
Robotics is just about reacting to the environment to perform some mechanical tasks. The ability to KILL ALL HUMANS is not strictly required.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I for one (Score:4, Insightful)
" 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.