The Future of Robotics: An Eminent Discussion
The futuristic reality of robots is closer than we think
We all know that robots are going to hold a huge role in our species’ future. A commonly quoted statistic is that 60% of the jobs that our generation will be applying for in 10 years don’t exist today, and concurrently, many of the jobs that we know today will soon be a thing of the past. This is in large part because of the ubiquitous nature of robotics technology. In 10 years, many predict that almost every single factory and service job will be replaced by robots — and we’re seeing the beginnings of this now. McDonalds restaurants around the world have been laying off cashiers in favour of large touchscreens that customers use to order and pay, and robots have held a prominent role in factory work since the Industrial Revolution. And with robotics research becoming increasingly sophisticated, it’s not a stretch for robots to entirely take over industries like farming, accounting, middle management, and more.
This reality is closer than we think, with the recent news that China has plans to lay off millions of low-wage workers and replace them with low-cost, high-efficiency robots. While this is bad news for the workers, the threat has always been there — as stated, basic robots have been doing the workers’ jobs for decades. The far more interesting (and more threatening) innovation is new research coming from MIT robotics labs — machine learning. While factory robots are efficient, they’re dumb as rocks and have no capability to adapt to new tasks.
New research, though, has created robots that can learn new tasks and adapt. Robots have taught themselves to make pancakes by reading WikiHow articles, and robot “toddlers” have taught themselves how to stand up. This sounds basic, but it’s an important first step to robots that can do the jobs of lawyers, scientists, and doctors. Once robots can learn, they can learn to do anything — they can take university classes or even just program themselves with the necessary information.
But what does this mean for us? What will humans do when robots inevitably gain the ability to be better than us at our jobs? That’s a question that we need to start answering. Futurists predict that, scarily enough, it will be near impossible to get any job without a university diploma in the very near future — which isn’t good for anyone except big corporations. While robots are efficient and cost-effective, they present a huge problem for people with low access to education. It’s likely that very soon, a high school education will provide very little job prospects. However, this robotics technology is groundbreaking and will certainly change the world. Whether the change is positive or negative? Only time will tell.
