Welcome, Robots
Today’s robots are providing opportunities to standardise work practices and create efficiencies.
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably never met a robot. But you will. I met one on a windy US prairie in January 2020, in the company of a rail-thin 31 year old named Noah Ready-Campbell. To the south, wind turbines stretched to the horizon. In front of me was a hole that would become the foundation for another one. A Caterpillar 336 excavator was digging that hole – 18 metres in diameter, with a f loor three metres deep and almost perfect ly level. Every dip, dig, raise, turn and drop of the 41-ton machine required firm control and well-tuned judgement. The excavator operator’s seat, however, was empty. Ready- Campbell, co-founder of Built Robotics, climbed onto the excavator and lifted the lid of a compartment on the roof. Inside was his company’s product – a 90kilogram device that does work that once required a human being.
“This is where the AI runs,” he said, pointing into the circuit boards, wires and metal boxes that make up the machine: sensors to tell it where it is, cameras to let it see, controllers to send commands to the excavator, communication devices that allow humans to monitor it, and the processor where its artificial intelligence, or AI, makes decisions.
When I was a child, I expected robots would look and act human, like C-3PO from Star Wars. Instead, the real robots that were being set up in factories were very different.
Today millions of these industrial machines bolt, weld, paint and do other repetitive, assembly-line tasks. Often fenced off to keep the remaining human workers safe, they are what roboticist Andrea Thomaz has called “mute and brute” behemoths.
Ready-Campbell’s device isn’t like that, or like C-3PO. It is, instead, a new kind of robot, far from human but still smart, adept and mobile. Once rare, these devices – designed to ‘live’ and work with people who have never met a robot – are migrating steadily into daily life.
Already, robots shelve and fetch goods in warehouses. They take inventory and clean floors in supermarkets. They cut lettuce and pick apples. They help children with
autism socialise and stroke patients regain the use of their limbs.
And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, replacing people with robots looks medically wise, if not essential. Robots now deliver food in Britain, tote supplies in a US hospital, disinfect patients’ rooms in China and Europe, and wander parks in Singapore, nagging pedestrians to maintain social distancing.
Last year, in the middle of a global economic collapse, the robotmakers I’d first contacted in 2019 said they were getting more, not fewer, inquiries from potential customers. The pandemic has made more people realise that “automation is going to be a part of work,” Ready-Campbell told me last May.
Even before the COVID crisis, technological trends were accelerating the creation of robots. Mechanical parts got lighter, cheaper and sturdier. Electronics packed more computing power into smaller packages. Better digital communications let engineers connect hundreds of robots, letting them share a collective intelligence, like a beehive’s.
“We’ve gotten used to having machine intelligence that we can carry around with us,” said Professor Manuela Veloso, an AI roboticist. She held up her smartphone. “Now we’re going to have to get used to intelligence that has a body and moves around without us.”
Outside her university office, her team’s ‘cobots’ – collaborative robots
– roam the corridors, guiding visitors and delivering paperwork. They look like iPads on wheeled display stands. “When you start accepting robots around you, like a third species, along with pets and humans, you want to relate to them,” Professor Veloso said.
We’re all just going to have to figure out how.
Vidal Pérez likes his new co-worker. For seven years, working for Taylors Farms in California, US, the 34 year old would bend at the waist and, using a large knife, slice off a head of lettuce, shear off imperfect leaves, and toss it into a bin.
Since 2016, though, a robot has done the slicing. It’s an eight-and-ahalf-metre-long, tractor-like harvester that moves down the rows and cuts off a lettuce head every time its sensor detects one. A conveyor belt carries the cut lettuce up to the harvester’s platform, where about 20 workers sort it into bins.
I met Pérez as he took a break from working a nine-hectare field of lettuce. “This is better, because you get a lot more tired cutting lettuce with a knife than with this machine,” he said. Riding on the robot, he rotates bins on the conveyor belt.
Not all the workers prefer the new system, he said. “Some people want to stay with what they know. And some get bored with standing on the machine.”
“We’re going through a generational change ... in agriculture,” Taylor Farms president Mark Borman told me. As older workers leave, younger people aren’t choosing to fill the backbreaking jobs. Restrict ions on cross-border migration haven’t helped either. “We’re growing, our workforce is shrinking, so robots present an opportunity that’s good for both of us,” Borman said.
It was a refrain I heard from employers in farming and construction, manufacturing and health care: we’re giving tasks to robots because we can’t find people to do them.
At the wind farm site, executives from the Mortenson Company, a construction firm that hired Built Robotics’ robots, told me about a dire shortage of skilled workers.
“Operators will say things like, ‘Oh, hey, here come the job killers’,” said Derek Smith, innovation manager for Mortenson. “But after they see that the robot takes away a lot of repetitive work and they still have plenty to do, that shifts pretty quickly.”
In a world that now fears human contact, it won’t be easy to fill jobs caring for children or the elderly. Maja Matari, a computer scientist and roboticist, develops ‘socially assistive robots’ – machines that do support, rather than physical support.
One project is a robot coach that leads an elderly user through an exercise routine. The robot, a plastic head, torso and arms atop a rolling
metal stand, can do some of what a human coach would do – for example, saying, “Bend your left forearm inwards a little,” during exercise, or “Nice job!” afterwards.
We walked around Matari’s lab – a warren of people in cubicles, working on the technologies that might let a robot help keep the conversation going in a support group, for example, or respond in an empathetic way.
I asked Matari if people ever got creeped out at the thought of a machine watching over Granddad. “The people who take care of other people in this country are underpaid and underappreciated,” she said. “Until that changes, using robots is what we’ll have to do.”
Economists disagree about how much and how soon robots will affect future jobs. But many experts do agree that some workers will have a hard time adapting to robots.
“The evidence is fairly clear that we have many, many fewer blue-collar production jobs, assembly jobs, in industries that are adopting robots,” said Professor Daron Acemoglu, who has studied the effects of robots and other automation. “That doesn’t mean that future technology cannot create jobs. But the notion that we’re going to adopt automation technologies left, right and centre and also create lots of jobs is a purposefully misleading and incorrect fantasy.”
Many people fear robots won’t take over just grunt work but the whole job, or at least the parts of it that are challenging, honourable – and well paid. People also fear robots will make work more stressful, perhaps even more dangerous.
Beth Gutelius, an urban planner and economist who has researched the warehouse industry, told me about one warehouse she visited after it introduced robots. The robots were
quickly delivering goods to humans for packing, saving the workers a lot of walking. On the flip side, it made them feel rushed and eliminated their chance to speak to one another.
We are already getting attached to robots. Military units have held funerals for bomb-clearing robots blown up in action. Nurses in hospitals tease their robot colleagues. As robots get more lifelike, people will invest them with even more affection and trust.
Adapting to them must start with realistic expectations, experts told me. Robots can be programmed or trained to do a well- defined task – dig a foundation, harvest lettuce – but none can equal the human mind’s ability to do a lot of different tasks, especially unexpected ones. None has yet mastered common sense.
Today’s robots can’t match human hands either, said Chico Marks, a manufacturing engineering manager at a Subaru car plant. The plant, like all carmakers, has used standard industrial robots for decades.
Marks showed me a group of wires that would snake through a future car’s rear door. “Routing a wiring harness into a vehicle is not something that lends itself well to automation,” he said. “It requires a human brain and tactile feedback to know it’s in the right place and connected.”
Robot legs aren’t any better. In 1996 Prof Veloso was part of a challenge to create robots that would play soccer better than humans by 2050. No one still expects it to happen anytime soon.
“It’s crazy how sophisticated our bodies are as machines,” Prof Veloso said. “We’re very good at handling
“IT’S GOING TO BE MANY YEARS BEFORE A BIPEDAL ROBOT CAN WALK AS WELL AS A PERSON”
gravity, dealing with forces as we walk, being pushed and keeping our balance. It’s going to be many years before a bipedal robot can walk as well as a person.”
Robots are not going to be artificial people. We need to adapt to them, and most robotmakers are engineering robots that make allowances for our human feelings.
Sarjoun Skaff, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bossa Nova Robotics, told me that in the long run, robots and people will settle on “interaction conventions” that will enable humans to know “how to interpret what the robot is doing and how to behave around it.” For now, robotmakers and ordinary people are feeling their way there.
In a conference room near Tokyo, I learned firsthand what it’s like to work with a robot: by wearing it. The exoskeleton, manufactured by a Japanese firm called Cyberdyne, consisted of two connected white tubes that curved across my back, a belt at my waist, and two straps on my thighs. I bent at the waist to lift an 18-kilogram container, which should have hurt my lower back. Instead, a computer in the tubes deduced that I was lifting an object, and motors kicked in to assist me.
Cyberdyne sees a large market in medical rehabilitation; it also makes a lower-limb exoskeleton used to help people regain the use of their own legs. For many of its products, “another market will be for workers, so they can work longer and without risking injuries,” Cyberdyne spokesman Yudai Katami said.
Though construction sites will always need human adaptability and ingenuity for some tasks, “with robots we see an opportunity to standardise practices and create efficiencies for the tasks where robots are appropriate,” said Gaurav Kikani, Built Robotics’ vice president for strategy, operations and finance.
When determining whose preferences ought to prevail, technology itself has no answers. However advanced, there’s one task robots won’t help us solve: deciding how, when, and where to use them.