Danger Will Robinson!

In the original Lost in Space, the robot would scream “Danger Will Robinson!” when trouble abounded close to Will, the young boy of the crew. But what if the robot was yelling at a different kind of futuristic danger? A future where manufacturing world would need no human manufacturers? Introducing from Rethink Robotics, a robot manufacturing that has created a human like substitute, Baxter.

 This new robot threat is just like Terminator, only instead of eliminating the human race it is eliminating jobs. Baxter is made to increase productivity and make America more competitive with manufacturing giants like China. The price of this robot will only be 22,000$ American dollars. This cost will far undermine the American worker (your average American worker will make around that much a year). Baxter is made with 75 percent American parts and is very easy to program. This is said to “unleash a revolution in manufacturing with a friendly faced factory robot” from IEEE Spectrum article. What? This robot can not only multitask but expresses emotions. These emotions are programed to add feedback.      

 How will this affect the hardworking? When will they create a robot that can do everything a human can do minus the added cost? Danger Will Robinson, your job is not safe!



 

AI and the Workplace. Who are your co-workers?

The future of employment is a crossroads, and although we do not yet work with A.I. artificial intelligence directly in the workplace, how long until this becomes a problem?

So we've all had calls from telemarketers, right? It always seems that they call just when you think you are safe. It has gotten to such an annoyance had my girlfriend's house that her dad has completed turned off the sound of the ringer on their phone so that the phone goes straight to voice mail if no one hears the caller id announce the number. But it seems that every message that is left is made by a synthesized voice produced electronically.

This appears to be the trend in telemarketing (isn't the Watson computer crazy?). It cannot be denied that using a synthesized voice can greatly reduce costs for telemarketing, especially when people just ignore the calls anyway. Speech technology is also progressing at a significant rate, and the differences between current and past technology is evident as shown in this Wikipedia article just below Stephen Hawking's picture.

But what is the cost of this type of advancement in the telemarketing industry? Fewer human employees means fewer expenses and more revenue, but it results in the loss of jobs for people. If this trend continues, A.I. technology can expand into other industries and even begin making financial decisions or even decisions on law (Watson again- the technology has a wide range of applications).

As A.I. is advanced, what will its role be in the workplace, and what industries will it be more adaptable to? Should this technology be further researched, and are there dangers to how our society is structures with the creation of more machines? Specifically, I ask you to think about the future and who your co-workers will be. Who knows, you may soon be a supervisor of ten promising young automated machine controllers!