Don’t fear the robot takeover
Imagine a future in which your house cleans itself every time you walk out the door. Without even being asked. And when you walk towards your letter box, your robot lawnmower gives you a beep to warn it’s hard at work so you don’t collide with it while getting into the self-driving car you hailed with your smartphone.
It’s a future that’s not very far away and is probably a realistic example of the coming robot takeover. At least, more realistic than a world dominated by mechanical humans hell bent on enslaving their creators, as Hollywood movies seem to indicate is a foregone conclusion.
Like it or not, the age of the robot is here, but don’t worry because, on a whole, it’ll probably be great. Or at least better than now.
Maha Fier, 16, of Paraparaumu College, north of Wellington, might be the first to agree. Her beach-cleaning robot is a very basic piece of technology, but the idea of inventing a robot to pick up rubbish encapsulates the future.
As much as we will increasingly use robots to fights wars, the robots that will have the most effect on our lives are those that relieve us of backbreaking and boring jobs we never liked doing much anyway.
Autonomous vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers are already an established technology. Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, plans to launch a driverless taxi service in the US city of Phoenix this year. Before long, owning a car that you drive will seem both ridiculously dangerous and absurdly expensive.
Don’t rush to convert your garage into a pool room just yet, but it won’t be long before these really are monuments to a redundant technology.
The robot revolution will come with great economic and social upheaval, just like the internet has wrought for the past 20 years, but bigger.
There are more than 25,000 truck drivers in New Zealand right now. In 10 years, thousands of them could be out of a job. If not before. The same can be said for taxi, bus and courier drivers.
Supermarkets are already embracing selfcheckouts and, while they’re not human-free yet, they will be soon. Only the most optimistic of checkout operators would imagine they’d still have a job in five years.
Online help bots that use artificial intelligence to mimic human capabilities are increasingly replacing real humans in call centres, and retailers are losing the battle against increasingly sophisticated online shopping sites. These packages will soon be packed and delivered, all without human intervention.
Millions of people will need to find new jobs and they will have to retrain. Probably more than once. It will be traumatic.
While the phenomenon is not new, the scale and speed of this is upheaval is unprecedented. It is largely why you’re hearing so much debate about such things as the universal basic income to keep the newly unemployed millions from starving. Or worse, starting a revolution.
But it probably won’t be as bad as that. Despite fears it would do the opposite, the industrial revolution two centuries ago created far more jobs than it ended. And many of the things robots will do will be jobs humans never did anyway. Like cleaning the beach after everyone goes home.
‘‘Millions of people will need to find new jobs and they will have to retrain. Probably more than once. It will be traumatic.’’