Hollywood has a great deal to answer for. It’s ruined the reputations of sharks, clowns and motel owners. And it’s done the same to robots, too. The word tends to conjure images of a creature made from metal, possibly with glowing red eyes and machine-guns for arms. Even benevolent machines like Star Trek’s Data have been known to go occasionally berserk.
Reactions to the idea of robots being introduced into the home and workplace have largely varied somewhere between concern and alarm. But the term ‘robot’ actually covers far more territory than is widely supposed. A robot needn’t have limbs to qualify; a machine which monitors the moisture levels at various points throughout a cabbage patch and then distributes water accordingly is a robot. Your fridge is technically a robot. When the thermostat indicates that things are warmer or cooler than they ought to be, it sends more or less power to the fans to compensate.
Robots have been with us for a while. What’s changed is that they’re getting very sophisticated, very quickly.
Robots are already widespread in the world of manufacturing. Without the precision and labour-saving advantages they provide, the modern family car would be impossible. As machine-learning algorithms grow more sophisticated, we should expect to robots being used in the service, sector, too.
In March, a company called Miso Robotics introduced its ‘flippy’ robot into a California restaurant. Flippy can create up to three-hundred burgers every hour. It can be used in any commercial kitchen, it will never get tired, its hygiene is impeccable, and it’s equipped with a thermal camera which ensures that each and every burger is cooked perfectly. The end of menial restaurant work is surely near – and it’s not just fast food that’ll be effected: onion-chopping and carrot-peeling in Michelin-star restaurants might also soon be automated.
According to government figures, just under 180,000 people are injured in road traffic accidents each year, around 1,800 of which are killed. And what about the purely economic incentives for automating transport: just think of the man-hours spent not only driving, but policing and administrating the roads.
Boston Dynamic’s impressive series of pathfinding dog-robots are a good example of where we might be headed in other sectors. The machine’s development has been funded thanks to its military applications, but the underlying technologies might find use elsewhere. Search-and-rescue operations and hillside agriculture might both be revolutionised. The wheel-equipped ‘Handle’ robot might do the same for logistics. The company is planning to start rolling out its robots commercially next year, ending decades of research.
The development of automated cars has been impeded by an enormous number of small challenges. These range from straightforward problems like how to distinguish a shadow from a pot-hole to complex moral problems, like how best to respond to a cat running out into the road when there’s a family hatchback six inches behind the rear bumper.
These problems will eventually all be surmounted, and the technology will become feasible. Last year, the government set aside an £8.1 million fund to help trial driverless lorries on our motorways. The Chancellor Philip Hammond seems to think that “fully driverless cars” will be with us by 2021 – a timeline that Thatcham, a leading automotive research centre, concur with. It might seem strange to think that by the time the next football World Cup rolls around, we’ll have fully driverless cars on our roads – but that just illustrates the pace of change.
Of course, as soon as one driverless car hits the road, millions more are sure to follow. Local taxi firms with entirely automated workforces would be able to price the flesh-and-blood competition out of the market. And reduced fares might mean that many of us give up our cars altogether – but of course, by then the market for used cars might well have crashed.
There are certain to be other adjustment pains. Millions of people are paid to drive trucks. Millions more drive taxis, or work as private couriers. These jobs might well disappear almost overnight – and unless a plan is in place to retrain these people, the social ramifications could be severe.
The catering industry might face similar problems. Just imagine if every McDonalds, Burger King and KFC in the country were to be equipped with robotic cooks like Flippy? And what about supermarket shelf-stackers and factory workers? Walmart has already begun to trial camera-equipped robots who can monitor and maintain shop displays. When these trials eventually succeed, millions of workers will become redundant.
As sizeable as these challenges might be, they aren’t entirely unfamiliar. The industrial revolution brought about the end of entire ways of life that had endured for centuries. But few could argue that it didn’t vastly improve the quality of life of just about everyone on planet earth. The coming revolution promises even greater advances!