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.'"
Reminds me of Manna (Score:4, Interesting)
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Only the technical barrier is about to be broken (Score:4, Interesting)
We'll notice. (Score:3, Interesting)
I hardly noticed the mobile phone revolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
...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.
Re:Nope. People will deny that they are robots. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not claiming that this is the correct answer, but I think of a robot as a machine that is capable of autonomously performing a variety of highly different tasks.
I guess I'm a robot denier.
Re:Reminds me of Manna (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad parent posted AC, because that short story [marshallbrain.com] is the absolute best futurist discussion of the topic.
Re:Level of AI (Artificial Intelligence) (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:We'll notice. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.