A restaurant in China lets robots do a lot of the work
Let's face it, the Robot Apocalypse is near. Just a few days ago, we met A.L.O Botlr, a robot from the high-tech Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, California that acts as a butler. Naturally, the food industry, as important as it is, couldn't stay behind, so here's where a new restaurant in China comes in. Simply called Robot Restaurant, the place, located in Kunshan, China, has over a dozen androids in its staff. Some of them are waiters, others cook and a couple greet customers as they come in -- sorry, everyone, no booze-carting servers here. Robot Restaurant's owner and founder, Song Yugang, that his peculiar staff members can understand about 40 "everyday sentences," making them smart enough to interact with human customers. Most importantly, he adds, "They can't get sick or ask for vacation. After charging up for two hours they can work for five hours."
Will restaurants be filled with robotic chefs and waiters/waitresses in the future? Which industries do you think will go relatively unaffected by robotics?
The industries I can think of are healthcare and anything that involves design.
This is because the healthcare industry requires not only knowledge but complex communication skills with patients. Doctors are trained in medical schools to memorize anatomy, physiology and pharmacology however they are also trained to interact with patients in sensitive and respectful manners. A robot can not do these tasks, and if they could, it would take centuries to develop the AI to handle emotionally complex tasks with no errors. And then, you would also need an Android and the patients themselves would have to appreciate the robots' emotional capabilities. And the chances of that are next to none. Patients are becoming more and more demanding of the emotional and communication aspects of healthcare.
Design often involves subjective and lateral thinking. Robots are not suited for these tasks yet.
The entertainment industry should also be resilient to robotics.
Robotics has both benefits and risks. The benefits are a decrease of the dependence on working age population and higher productivity and efficiency. However the risks include decrease in birth rates (people are out of jobs and they wont have enough capital to start a family and reproduce) and an increase in the aging population. I wont go into robotic AI plasticity as that's too much science fiction.
Well they are already many automated robot services. Bank, internet, trains, just to name a few. I highly doubt that things would ever get integrated completly where human interaction is demanded; i good mix works well. Let the robot do repetitive tasks, let the human do human tasks.
Also if nobody needs to work anymore where will people be able to make money? will they be just a bunch of super-rich people and masses of workless-moneyless people? oh wait...
They're coming!! Seriously that's pretty cool, but having human servers and chefs is great roll, hopefully this doesn't go mainstream while I'm still alive :o
While some of their statements are really far fetched and some might come from pure ignorance, most of the stuff in the video is still interesting.
That's a very simplified view IMO.
Robots can not handle emotional tasks like humans can. They may be able to imitate emotions and learn what emotional response to make when presented with a specific situation. However robotic emotions will never be genuine.
This is why professions such as entertainment and healthcare (most likely doctors) will always exist. Professions like engineering, accounting and investment banking will not fare so well. Transportation and manual labor will be the first jobs to go.
Even if we imagine in some decades or centuries when they are finally successful in creating an AI that is virtually the same as humans in terms of emotions, that will be the scary bit. However this is purely science fiction for now.
So what if robotics can benefit companies. If the great depression repeats itself and the unemployment rate goes above 25%, then this will not benefit the economy. There will be recessions and companies will go bankrupt. The population will start to shrink due to falling birth rates and increasing suicide rates. Robotics is NOT necessarily good for the economy.
I agree that the video I linked provides a very very simplified view; And I genuinely hate the fact that they want to sell neural networks as "the" solution to robots being able to learn virtually anything without us having to tell them how to do it, or even having to know how it works at all. That's a misconception and really rubs me the wrong way.
But.
The human brain *can* be compared to a computer. And our emotional reactions are basically "just" a product of (many) different factors; if you knew all the factors you could definately predict emotions. There is no randomness.
Now, your doctors example. I know at least in Austria the education for doctors is getting worse. They also can't spend as much time with each patient as you'd expect from watching various TV shows, simply because the hospitals can't afford enough doctors and everyone's working their ass off while trying to not make mistakes. It's become a real shit job in my eyes. Having some sort of artificial "assistants" that can perform tasks you don't really need a human for would go a long way in my opinion. Maybe even to the point where you only have someone who talks to patients and tells them what's going on but doesn't do the actual examination. Give the thing a face, if you will. If it improves the service, I see nothing wrong about it.
That mini-documentary says that more technology won't make more, better jobs for horses (instead they got replaced by the car) so we should think that the same is true for humans. I think that's probably the weakest part of that, just because if people become obsolete in sectors that employ the majority of people then poverty would skyrocket and lead to riots; its in no one's best interest (including the companies hiring) so it won't happen. Even if they didn't the purchasing power of the average consumer would decrease which would effect these same companies.
To be honest I don't really know what they were trying to get at; They can't possibly think that comparing humans with horses and then saying the horse population went down is a good thing? But at some points it appears to be their point. Idk, it's not very well made, I just linked it because I thought it was an interesting addition to the thread and could provide more content for discussions.
While some of their statements are really far fetched and some might come from pure ignorance, most of the stuff in the video is still interesting.
That's a very simplified view IMO.
Robots can not handle emotional tasks like humans can. They may be able to imitate emotions and learn what emotional response to make when presented with a specific situation. However robotic emotions will never be genuine.
This is why professions such as entertainment and healthcare (most likely doctors) will always exist. Professions like engineering, accounting and investment banking will not fare so well. Transportation and manual labor will be the first jobs to go.
Even if we imagine in some decades or centuries when they are finally successful in creating an AI that is virtually the same as humans in terms of emotions, that will be the scary bit. However this is purely science fiction for now.
So what if robotics can benefit companies. If the great depression repeats itself and the unemployment rate goes above 25%, then this will not benefit the economy. There will be recessions and companies will go bankrupt. The population will start to shrink due to falling birth rates and increasing suicide rates. Robotics is NOT necessarily good for the economy.
Healthcare is maybe one of the easier sectors to be robotized, there are only small improvements needed in the area of bio-engineering and bio-informatics to automize diagnostics, genetics (and the risk factors), treatment, hell even surgery can be done much more efficient and specific with a robotized arm than a human arm. If all the data can be crossreferenced in a cloud based system and a computer can instantly access all that information, all that bureaucratic bullshit the healthcare sector suffers from (very time consuming), people will be cured and treated much more efficiently and at a much faster pace.
Also, why need an economy when everyhing is completely automatic?
If you understand anything about end-user diagnostics in Medicine, it's actually the last place that'll be taken over by robots. Though the assistance should, hopefully, in the future provide faster diagnosis of rarer conditions.
Robots take over everything work related? Well go for it! I cannot wait for this to happen today! Which means i get to have every free time i can ever imagine, which was the point of it in the first place. Remove the necessity of money out of the picture and there you have it! Utopia.