by Jason EricksonPrevious speculations that robots would increasingly displace the human workforce are coming rapidly into better focus. Predictions such as those made by Professor of Computer Science, Moshe Vardi, when he stated that all human work will be fully outsourced to robots and robotic machine intelligence by 2045 now look quite optimistic for humans.
Early last year, at a high-level economic conference at Davos, Switzerland, Jeremy Howard put full replacement of certain sectors on a five-year timeline. The robotics industry is in fact logging record sales in North America, and interest only continues to surge.
Just recently we looked at security robots that are already in use at prisons, care facilities, and schools. One robot in Britain called "Bob" was introduced at a $4 per hour fixed cost, potentially making redundant the 1.5 million humans who are currently employed in some form of security patrol.
Robots have even begun penetrating the retail environment with home improvement and appliance chain, Lowe's, testing a bilingual robotic staff member to assist with order fulfillment.
University of Oxford Associate Professor in Machine Learning, Michael Osborne, unequivocally stated at the QUT's Real World Futures conference that, "algorithms are increasingly a cheaper alternative to human work" and "they are replacing some of the most quintessential human activities."
One aspect that Osbourne mentions as being specifically "threatening" is the fact that those human beings least equipped to modify their employment - i.e. lower-skilled, lower-salaried employees - are the very ones set for replacement, which he believes could lead to an ever widening wealth gap. This has certainly been proven in the area of physical security as well as ... floor washing?
The University of Lincoln issued the following release today, which states in part:
Floor washing robots could soon be used to clean large industrial and commercial premises, following a European research collaboration totalling 4.2 million Euros.
FLOor washing roBOT, or FLOBOT, will be a large-scale, autonomous floor washing machine, for washing the floors of supermarkets, airports and other big areas that have to be cleaned regularly.
Although it can be manually started, programmed and monitored by people, there will be no need to physically move it around making the process more efficient....
Dr Bellotto said: “Our key aim is to program FLOBOT to detect and track people moving around so as to avoid them, and also be able to estimate typical human trajectories in the premises where it operates. We can then predict where it is likely to be most dirty, by analysing those trajectories and the general use of the environment.
“We will be modifying existing scrubbing machines, making them autonomous by adding new electronics and sensors, including a laser range finder and a 3D camera for detecting people. We are advancing technologies already developed at Lincoln and a prototype will be tested and validated throughout this project.”
Floor washing tasks have many demanding aspects, including autonomy of operation, navigation and path optimization, safety with regards to humans and goods, interaction with human personnel, easy set-up and reprogramming.
FLOBOT addresses these problems by integrating existing and new solutions to produce a professional floor washing robot for wide areas...
Professor Duckett said: “The general idea is to create professional service robots that will work in our everyday environments, providing assistance and helping to carry out tasks that are currently very time - and labour - intensive for human workers. Participating in this Innovation Action project is really exciting, because it means that many of the underpinning research concepts and technologies we have been developing at the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems now have the potential to leave the laboratory and become part of real products like cleaning robots, which could impact on the everyday lives of people everywhere.”
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It's that "labor intensive" part that spells the demise of another sector of human employment. And, according to Apple founder Steve Wozniak, it might be wishful thinking that only "unskilled" labor is on the chopping block. As he stated in a recent interview:
Computers are going to take over from humans, no question.
Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently. (Source)
While Wozniak went so far as to conclude that humans very likely could essentially become "pets" to a type of Superintelligence, other studies have in fact shown that, yes, robotics might target more manual aspects of labor, but advanced A.I. could supplant even those in many higher-paid white-collar fields such as accounting, medical staff, and even writers.
Farhad Manjoo, tech columnist for the New York Times offers a glimpse of a near-future common dilemma:
Artificial intelligence machines are getting so good, so quickly, that they're poised to replace humans across a wide range of industries. In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible—they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing—robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can't afford lawyers today. But there's a dark side, too: Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner—and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now? (Source)
What DO you do now? Do you fear robot replacement in your own line of work? Have you already seen a shift at your place of employment? Or do you think that technology will always pose risks and rewards and this is just one more example of how humans will integrate with their new inventions? -
http://www.techswarm.com/2015/03/outsourcing-to-robots-continues-flobot.html
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