There have been many indications lately that the current boom in AI is feeding through to robotics, and rapidly advancing their development. This is another sign of that. The article references "your household robot" - but I wonder if this tech will show up in work environments sooner? It looks like it's almost ready for a wide range of unskilled or semi-skilled manual work.
Futurology
It looks like it's almost ready for a wide range of unskilled or semi-skilled manual work.
Humans Need Not Apply - CGP Grey
We may finally be entering the Humans Need Not Apply era. I think this has the potential to be beneficial for society in the long-term, but there will be a transition period that we will need to handle carefully.
Man, I love CGP Grey.
It's also kind of interesting to see how the predictions have changed, 10 years on. We're still worried about the basic idea, but it seems less imminent, and there may be a period where blue collar workers fare the best. CGP thought blue collar workers would be replaced; in present tense, even.
Case in point, Baxter was discontinued in 2018. Word on the street is that he sucked, and the demonstrations were very produced. Self driving cars "were there", but they didn't "work" like he said; not a very important few percent of the time, anyway.
That would be an inversion of the current trend that withe collar work become replaceble with AI but blue not.
There is a LOT of money being invested in replacing blue collar workers
Thats true.
The website blocks me, but assuming this is about a system that allows a worker to do manual labour at a distance, it might be the most interesting use case for robotics right now. AI struggles really bad with complex physical environments - even the most controlled, public roadways, have proven to be a research money pit. There's no reason you couldn't just transmit human movements to a robot with similar mechanical capacities, though, and sensory information the other way. The acronym makes it sound like that's what this is.