This month I investigated the role of collaborative robots in the future workplace. Turns out that an automated helper is not that far off in fact.
humans and robots will be co-workers one day
. And all the implications
It's not likely to be Star Wars, but come on, we could have built this ship a long time ago.
As the world heads to a future where work and play seamlessly fuse, “people” will begin to take the place of “robot”, according to the director of Nasa’s new space technology division.
Ben Gurion University’s Gregory Matloff believes that the days of people being replaced by machines in the workplace are fast approaching.
“We are beginning to approach the point where robots will begin to take the place of people,” said Dr Matloff, who is also a researcher at Ben-Gurion University’s Robotics Research Centre.
Speaking to the BBC, Dr Matloff said that this was a big step away from our present situation in which “people” are the main players in the workplace.
“If you look at the way that technology is developing, and what we’ve already seen, robots are beginning to do more and more of the tasks that people used to do,” he said.
“In some cases, we have already gone to the point where we have a robot serving a person who is totally reliant on a robot for their livelihood.”
Dr Matloff said that this would be a “big change” but added that there would still be “a large role for human beings in society”.
“In the future, all the computers will be replaced by the cloud. And that doesn’t mean you can’t have a computer in your house, it’s just that it’s all done electronically and you have access to it all the time.”
“We are not going to be able to replace all the computers because there’s a lot of things we do that are not something we can program.”
The full interview is on the BBC iPlayer from 2 pm.
In a nutshell, computers are becoming more powerful and cheaper. So in the short term, we'll have to co-exist with robots. But the key thing here is that we need to make sure we're not reliant on them.
There will be a 'dull' future, where a small minority are creative.
What you have just read is a piece of writing generated by the website EleutherAI . All I did was type in a prompt or a short sentence and artificial intelligence does the rest.
At times it may not make sense, however, that is where humans come in. You see right now we can load up pages of discourse from blogs and Reddit and the AI looks for the patterns and within a brief moment can generate a few paragraphs. It is up to the humans to fine-tune the work, add in grammar and punctuation where it is missing.
AI is clever, however, we are yet to teach it context and nuances. As these are particularly tricky to teach machines who rely upon logic to operate.
So when someone states that AI and automation may take our jobs, they are half right. The automation does the dull work, the heavy lifting so to speak. It is up to us humans to add in the Midas touches. We need to stop thinking about them as robots, but rather think of them as cobots. In. the not so distant future humanity will be liberated from unskilled labour in favour of more rounded, cultural and technical pursuits. Think of it like Google Maps. The app does not drive your car, it directs you on the best route in real-time. This is the role AI and Automation play in the not so distant future.
Welcome to the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.