An Unemployed World (part 2)

The Robots Are Coming

(If you haven't done so yet, please read the first part of this post)

We are at an age of incredible technological innovation, driven by the extraordinary increase in processing power predicted by Moore's Law. This not only allows more complicated software to run and process information, but also increases the capabilities of sensors and actuation devices. In simple words, this allows for automatic robots to sense their environment, process this information, make decisions, and act upon on those decisions.

Robots are not new, and their growing role in industry has started many decades ago. Car manufacturers use robotic assembly lines to reduce the cost of labor, increase throughput, and improve overall productivity.


So far, robots were expected to replace human workers in jobs that require simple skills, manual labor, and repetitive work performed in a structured environment. Such positions were deemed "easy to automate", and therefore easy to be replaced by robots. Obviously, there is the initial investment in development or acquisition of such robots, and the ongoing cost of using them, but that seemed to be cheaper than the wages of the Western worker (at first) and today even the lower wages in China (http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/foxconn-allegedly-replacing-human-workers-with-robots/).

And programming the robot is going to be fairly easy, if we take this Baxter robot as an example:
While it is not new that automation replaces manual labor, the array of positions, in which humans can be replaced by robots has been growing and will grow in the upcoming future. These will include positions that are less structured, less repetitive, and that require more skills and knowledge. Here are a few examples:

Unmanned aerial vehicles are not yet incorporated into the National Airspace, Google's has been developing autonomous cars that have already been proven to be safer than human-driven cars, and that have gained legal status in some states, including Nevada and California (http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/tech/innovation/self-driving-car-california). In the future, these vehicles may replace truck, taxi, or bus drivers.

Another less-skilled job that can be replaced by a robot is a restaurant waiter. One such example is from a restaurant in China, and although this robotic waiter is not performing every single task a waiter does, remember that it was developed more than two years ago!


What about jobs that require more of a human touch? Apparently, these can be done by specialized robots as well. For example, a humanoid robot that helps children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).

A similar project is a robot that teaches a second language to toddlers (http://mplab.ucsd.edu/wordpress/?page_id=277). 

Finally, the human worker's last resort is jobs that require the ability to analyze information in a context and make inferences regarding an uncertain situation. For example, the work that medical doctors do when they diagnose a patient, suggest treatment, and follow up on that treatment. There is a robotic medical doctor too, the famous Watson (http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/ibm-watson/archive/2013/04/how-memorial-sloan-kettering-is-training-watson-to-personalize-cancer-care/274556/).

In a recent article, Wired magazine categorizes all jobs into four classes:

Four Types of Jobs (from http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/all/)

So, what happens next? What will become of us, humans, once robots will be able to perform all the jobs in the world better and more efficiently than us? I will dedicate the next part of this to answering some of these questions.