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Asked by anon-251974 on 29 Apr 2020.
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David Sobral answered on 29 Apr 2020:
In principle we could collectively decide to allow ourselves to be much happier and to pursuit interesting activities by assuring that robots do the more repetitive work. The problem is making sure we don’t leave people behind and perhaps having a nice combination of people and robots working together could work really well. Most importantly, if we also want to tackle climate change and global inequalities, we need to make sure we re-think the world and use science and working together to make it a much more fun and good place to live in for the future!
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Sheila Kanani answered on 29 Apr 2020:
I think for things to be really successful we need robots and humans doing things together. There are some aspects of jobs that can only be done by humans, and there are dangerous jobs that we could get robots to do so that we don’t endanger humans. For example, it is great sending robots into space because they can last a lot longer, don’t need food, there’s no ethical issues about getting them home safe, etc., but you can’t get robots to make educated decisions if things in space go wrong….yet! Also, a very valuable thing about humans is human experiences, thoughts and feelings, that robots just don’t have!
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anon answered on 29 Apr 2020:
Looking back at the industrial era, all the progress happened due to automation. Cars are built by machines, electronics are built by machines. People control the machines, as in – program them. These would be the robotic arms executing very precise movements over, and over, and over again.
With rise of 3D printing another revolution is on the way – we can potentially print quite literally anything.
All in all, I feel that automation is great. All the talk about how “robots take people’s jobs” is as ridiculous as “immigrants taking our jobs”. What happens when tasks get automated is, it frees people to do other things. Like when you code an algorithm to calculate something for you – this used to be done by people too. It is a dull and monotonous task, just like working on assembly line.
So, the more automation we have, the more creative we can be as society. Trying to hold on to the careers that are getting replaced by machines is opposite of progress. Did a lot of professions dissapear during the industrial era? Yes! But many more appeared as a result.
There will always be things people can do that robots cannot do. At least until we build a true AI 🙂 -
Malgorzata Drwila answered on 29 Apr 2020:
A agree with all the comments above. Right now there are still many things, which can be automated and many people are losing a lot of time and energy on a repetitive work. Human supervision will always be needed to check the quality of the work robot did, to make sure that everything goes with a plan and potentially find ways to improve the automation.
In my field many scientists are spreading panic that AI will automate everything and there will be no need for geophysicists anymore. But it is not true. I see many AI driven approaches being implemented in my work, which speed up some processes, so I can have more time for other important things.
To conclude: automation will help us to do things better and faster and will drive the innovation. It will not mean that it will do all the work for us and we will become jobless. We will only get less overwhelmed (hopefully).
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Susan Cartwright answered on 29 Apr 2020: last edited 29 Apr 2020 12:45 pm
Looking at human history, increasing automation has generally made things better in the long term (though it has certainly caused problems such as increased unemployment in the short term). You really would not want to have to live in the era when everything had to be made by hand: that meant that a lot of people had really horrible jobs (I wouldn’t go so far as to call them “careers”), and it also meant that a lot of things that we consider almost disposable were so expensive that they were out of reach of the ordinary working person (how many T-shirts do you have? A Victorian working-class person probably had exactly two shirts: one on his back, and one in the wash). So, on the whole, experience suggests that further automation will make things better.
There are things that robots do better than people: most cars are made largely by robots these days, and as long as the location of the car on the assembly line is predictable they can do it more accurately than a human worker could. That sort of thing will improve as robots become more sophisticated. Surgeons use devices which are often called “robots” (though strictly speaking they aren’t, as they are controlled by the surgeon and not by pre-programmed instructions) to perform very delicate surgery: the surgeon’s movements can be scaled down so that very tiny objects can be manipulated. One can imagine this improving to the point where the robot manipulators might be able to do routine procedures genuinely robotically, only having to send for a real surgeon if something unexpected happened (such as one of the minor variations in anatomy that most of us have).
Driverless cars are an example that seems genuinely to be on the horizon. This definitely has the potential to improve daily life: think of the road accidents that are caused by lapses of attention, being druck, misjudging a distance, failing to spot an oncoming motorbike and so on. It might also allow us to reduce the total number of cars on the road (since you can imagine robot taxis that would be routed so as to transport people more efficiently), and that would help with climate change and environment generally.
I don’t really see the Terminator-style “machines take over the world!” scenario as a likely outcome. So far, humans and robots have worked in partnership, and I expect that to continue.
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Ry Cutter answered on 1 May 2020:
This is quite a topical question! Everybody else has given a pretty comprehensive answer so I’m gonna run in a slightly different direction!
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New laws have just been put in place saying Artificial Intelligence can’t own copyright. This means any code, art, or intellectual property can’t be owned by AI, but instead the owner of the AI!
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This isn’t a big deal right now because AI isn’t smart enough to know it can even own the stuff it’s making. But imagine in the future when AI is smart enough to interact with humans on a social level! Will this mean we need classes of AI in the future to distinguish between printers and androids, what kind of rules do we expect the robots to follow, should they be the same as human laws? These sound like dystopian future questions, but we need to start thinking about them now! Machine Learning ethics and philosophy is a really big topic at the moment, it ties in very closely to your question. At what point do we say “okay people are redundant for work, we’ll let the robots do everything while we spend our lives in luxury”
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Brilliant Question,
Ry
Comments
Kim commented on :
I think this is an incredibly important question for politicians and societies to address – I believe it is entirely likely that an ever increasing number of jobs will be taken over by machines in the future. This will most likely make our lives better like computers have, and new jobs can be created that are better for most people. However, there are a few steps that need to be taken to protect value of human work if robots start to manage themselves. I love this video by Kurzgesagt which explains how automation may change the shape of our economy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk