This robot scare is getting out of hand.

[Workingman]

The BBC, Sky and other Tech sites have been running this scare for a few weeks now. They have little apps you can use to check your likelihood of being robotted out of a job - 35% of us are at risk by 2025.... Yeah right!

Just about any job could be done by a robot, given time and the correct algorithms, from CEO of a multi-national to a shelf stacker, but will they?

If nobody is working who will buy the goods and services? Will the robot sales assistant sell your robot shopper the right goods? Will the robot politician vote the way you expected or will it vote for itself? Oh, wait!

Most importantly, what will happen to all the excess humans?

[TheOstrich]

Most importantly, what will happen to all the excess humans?

We'll send 'em to Germany.

Joking apart, it's an interesting subject, nevertheless. Many clerical jobs have disappeared due to "automation" - take tax returns purely as an example. The simple edict to "file online" has cut thousands of clerical jobs at HMCE and also seen losses in the associated service professions like accountants who no longer require low-level processing staff. No reason why manual jobs won't be next .......

[Suff]

The press are, as usual, so far behind the curve it's not funny.

Most of the low hanging fruit with automated (and let's face it robotics is nothing more than the automation of simple repetitive tasks), handling and manufacturing systems. Those systems have put more people out of work already than future robotics developments.

The last big surge in that was automated call handling systems.

In fact this has been going on since the first spinning jenny, since Caxton's printing press and Watt's steam engine. We've already seen how this works with Black Friday on the stock markets. Where machines were simply doing what they were told.

There is a term in the business. GIGO. Garbage In Garbage Out. Or the other one. To err is human, to screw things up completely requires a computer.

To have the infinitely capable computer requires infinitely complicated programming. We, humans, make mistakes, but we learn from them. Computers, on the other hand, will make the same mistake, faster and in much greater volume and will not learn from any of them.

I have been hearing about "self healing" systems and "smart systems" for more than 2 decades. As far as I can tell, we've made almost no progress at all in that area. Witness the Air France Airbus which went down in the Atlantic. When they finally got their hands on the flight data recorder, they found that the 3, cross checking, super smart, computers, which everyone relies on; simply allowed the #3 pilot to stall the plane, tail first, into the ocean at nearly 500mph.

It followed protocol. The weather exceeded the parameters set for the system so it handed the control over to the pilots. The pilot, sitting in the command seat, didn't realise the plane had let him override. The computer, as designed, blocked the #2 pilot from overriding the #3 pilot because he was sitting in the wrong chair.

And we're going to be taken over by computers and all lose our jobs???

Right!

[Workingman]

I remember the future as predicted by Tomorrows World etc. in the 60s.

By now we would all be bathing by our pools while the robots cleaned the house and prepared our food. That happened, didn't it?

[Suff]

Imagine our lives being ruled by a bunch of idiots who can do the wrong thing over and over again...

Wait. Isn't that the definition of a government

[Kaz]

I remember the future as predicted by Tomorrows World etc. in the 60s.

By now we would all be bathing by our pools while the robots cleaned the house and prepared our food. That happened, didn't it?

Frank - "Where's my jetpack??" was Mick's response to the robot segment on BBC Breakfast this morning

[cromwell]

Increasing automation will put people out of work, it always has.

If it goes past a tipping point we will be left with an economic system which on the one hand says "the more people, the better" because it keeps wages down and consumption of goods up, and on the other might lead to a situation where we have millions sitting around with no work, no prospect of work but still needing to survive at the same time as the benefits system and NHS are running out of money.

An interesting one!

[Aggers]

Doesn't the future look rosy.

[Workingman]

Only if you happen to be an Android.... and there's the rub.

I have read a few more articles and comments and people are conflating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with humanoids such as Data from Star Trek.

The Androids will build better and more intelligent Androids and they will do the same...... all scary stuff.

But go the other way. Ebola sprang out of nowhere, killed thousands and had no antidote. It took goodness knows how many people, manhours, labs, energy and resources before we eventually came up with one.

Give the same problem to a specifically designed AI piece of kit and with enough processing power it could go through all the variables and iterations in hours: days. It would discard the ones that failed but retain the knowledge of why and apply it to another attempts. It would do everything through modelling and spit out details of the possible successes for us humans to take away and make.

[Suff]

Well if you look at the past trend of predictions, such as flying cars and nuclear fusion by they year 2000, the predictions are not very good.

In fact the main enabling technologies were not envisioned at all.

Computer power and modelling
Digital storage
Pervasive digital networks (internet)
Social Media
Mobility access to digital services and networks

The last two were not envisioned by anyone. In fact it took the whole industry a decade to even realise the impact of a single, world wide, pervasive network on which everyone could read, talk, shop, plan, book and basically organise our lives.

In fact we are still coming to terms with the mobility aspect of all of this. Witness the fact that mobile phones become virtually redundant within 3 years. I have a Nokia phone which has better speakers, far better Bluetooth capabilities and better media capabilities than most of the phones on the market today. Including Nokia/Microsoft phones. Yet it is totally useless as a phone or an internet device now. It doesn't even have wifi.

Whilst the direction we are going in will soon catch up with some of the more outlandish thinking such as personal assistants in our phones and computers, like Siri or Cortana, nobody who envisioned these services actually envisioned the whole infrastructure which would have to stand behind them.

In storage alone the track has been astronomical. In 1998 I designed the storage infrastructure for the entire Philipps mail environment. 110,000 users, 30 terrabytes of storage. In Eindhoven alone there were 25 terrabytes in one room. 300sq meters of cabinets standing nearly 5 feet tall. Today I have 41 terrabytes of storage in my apartment and another 12 terrabytes at home. The cost of that storage for Philipps in 1998 was millions, my storage has not even cost me 3,000.

In 1990 my computer on my desk at work took about 90 seconds to verify it’s 4mbytes of memory before starting. My boss told me that gigabytes of memory would be impossible because it would take more than a day to verify it before you could work. Yet 5 years later my PC was verifying 128mbytes of RAM in a fraction of a second. Today I have 32 Gigabytes of RAM in my Laptop.

In the 1960’s the advent of Laser technology made the forward thinkers believe we’d have “death rays” by the end of the century. In fact they didn’t even begin to touch the surface of what lasers would mean to us.

Measuring, surveying, surgery, imaging, 3d imaging, communication, optical storage, manufacturing, 3d manufacturing and the list goes on and on and on. One tiny invention which completely and utterly changed the way we create and live within our lives. Before Lasers Silicon Chips or, more properly, integrated circuits, which are the bedrock of our technology today (being embedded in almost every electrically powered product we buy today), were not even envisioned by the most far seeing thinkers.

Then there is the spreadsheet and databases which drive them. When I was growing up the press were still going on about how a highly trained (they were always old), Abacus user could outperform a computer at calculations. Even I, who had never touched a computer or even a pocket calculator (they didn’t exist), knew that this was stupid. Roll forward a few decades and the entire financial report for the budget of the entire united kingdom could be modelled at the press of a button. The Chancellor tells you what he’s going to do with taxes and incentives, the opposition keys the figures into the spredsheet and 5 minutes later they can tell you the financial impact to every group of people in the UK. In companies this means entire departments of thousands of bookkeepers and accountants, required to produce ONE report every Three Months, are out of a job.

Yet these things were not envisioned.

If anything, the advances we have made in the last 5 decades have taught us to be more skeptical of what we will be able to do in the coming century, not more confident. We still don’t even know how Gravity works….

One of the biggest pushes on today is to create a computer that can learn. Or, in other words, artificial intelligence. Because it is the learning and gaining of knowledge on which to base future decisions which separates us from the other species on the planet (or so they say).

So, in fact, what they are trying to do is create life. I don’t call it artificial life because once it starts to learn it will become conscious and once it’s conscious, it will be life.

The very biggest danger of all that is what that life we have created will think of us!!! Not that the mainstream press will push that angle very much. What they should be pushing is Asimov’s laws of robotics.

If it were law, everywhere, never to create silicon life without those constraints built into the very fabric of the hardware, we could be very comfortable about creating silicon life. But what do the papers want to talk about? Losing jobs…. Pitiful