Shower thought: The path forward for robots taking human jobs.
(This is purely opinion, backed by zero studies, so please discuss in the comments. It isn’t Earth shattering insight either, so here is the ‘this is obvious warning’. It also isn’t an article with advice for the robots).
This thought is about robots moving around in the real world, not LLMs or agents moving in the virtual.
It seems the popular opinion is divided into;
- Robots will replace all us workers in no time
- Robots won’t replace us for decades because what we do as humans is too clever.
I think robots replacing us will be a transition over time. Probably not a lot of time, but certainly years, not months.
Take for example a delivery robot. It would not only need to navigate all sorts of strange and unexpected obstacles, it would need to find a way to place the package such that ratbag human thieves have less of a visible temptation.
This requires the type of creative thinking that, at the moment, only us meat bags can do.
At the same time, some packages are heavy, and even when they are not, carrying several hundred a day, week after week, can wear a person out.
And finally, delivery robots, or drones, will be subject to much attack by the desperate hoards roaming the streets. If you want packages to get where they are going, one can either arm one’s drones with electrification and bear spray, or have a human with them (armed with taser and bear spray obv).
So it makes sense that a delivery driver have a robot assistant. It will probably have wheels because they are the fastest these days, and getting up stairs with wheels is becoming trivial.
That’s what I think will happen.
Hospitals will have auto trays rolling around of course, but actual assistance robots will start to exist (along with the trial of exoskeletons for the nurses who have to flip the patients every so often). A robot patient flipper (YouTube used without permission. I hope it is ok.) would be a better option than all the nurses wearing ex-military combat skeletons.
Robots in supermarkets will only be able to do so much, and a lot of people won’t talk to them anyway initially, so the I think the place robots will appear first will be anywhere they can take some of the burden of lifting and carrying away.
So warehouses will have several autonomous fork lifts, but these will have options for human override in areas where the bot doesn’t know what to do.
Delivery and hospitals I’ve discussed.
And if self drive doesn’t get itself sorted out, the vehicles will have links back to teleoperation centres that will have humans there to drive the vehicle remotely.
I think tele-operated robots in space will become the norm. Rather than spend millions on suits for the humes to go outside and get irradiated, spend it on multiple robots that spend their time on the hull doing all the stuff. There will be a mix of autonomous and tele-operated. I can’t see why that won’t happen.
A human is always fairly big, which means propellant to move them around in space will always be costly. A robot can be made very light while being stronger than the equivalent human, and so will save propellant. And if it drifts away from the spacecraft, it won’t be a screaming rush to get it back. Given the cost of getting into space, losing the occasional bot won’t be a big deal. They’ll have a rapid dissassembly explosive perhaps so they can be dispatched, or maybe we’ll hit them with a communication laser. I don’t know.
In hospitals, machines will learn what a surgeon does, and in some instances surgeries will be completely automated. The era of the autodoc will have started. I don’t think this will be a rapid adoption either, but it is inevitable that robot surgeons will appear, although I doubt they’ll roll into theatre and take to people with a scalpel. More likely they’ll be mounted to the roof.
Over time it is clear that the machines will get better. More intelligent with every day. Also the more we see robots, the less will be our opposition, so naturally humans will get replaced in certain areas, but I don’t think it will be as sudden as some people are suggesting (although I do think it is inevitable).
That’s my shower thought. Discussion welcome.