The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HOW ROBOTS WILL CHANGE THE WORKFORCE
1 trend: Driverless transportation will eliminate some jobs.
Thirty of the world’s top scientists are scheduled to meet at the University of California at San Diego in February to discuss the toughest challenges in robotics and automation, including how to make driverless cars safe for a mass audience.
The experts are being brought together by Henrik Christensen, the prominent Georgia Tech engineer who was hired in July to run UC San Diego’s young Contextual Robotics Institute.
Christensen said at the time, “I want to build a research institute that, ideally, will be in the top five in the world five years from now. Why not see if we can make San Diego ‘Robot Valley.’”
The February forum is being eyed as a step toward raising the university’s visibility in robotics, a field defined by grand advances and embarrassing setbacks. Christensen recently sat down with The San Diego Union-Tribune to talk about what’s likely to happen in the near term. The following is an edited version of that conversation:
Q: Automation and robotics are advancing quickly. What impact will this have on employment in the United States?
A: We see two trends. We will use robots and automation to bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas, primarily from Southeast Asia. At the same time, we will see some jobs get displaced by automation. There will be fully automated, driverless transportation in this country by 2020, and that will eliminate some jobs now held by workers like truck drivers and taxi drivers.
Q: Will there be a net increase or decrease in jobs? A: To be honest with you, we don’t know. There was a recent study on this by the National Academies, but there wasn’t enough good data to make it clear what the outcome will be. We do see a lot of change occurring. Amazon is printing books at its local distribution centers, then sending them on to customers. They print the book, put a cover on it and off it goes. That cuts down on transportation jobs and costs.
Q: Are you saying that Amazon is just beginning to do this?
A: It’s happening today. This program has been in existence for more than a year. The last estimate I heard was that 65 percent of the books Amazon delivers are printed in its local distribution centers. Amazon wants to do (widespread) deliveries of groceries, too.
Q: But doesn’t this assume that the technology of driverless vehicles is much further along than it actually is?
A: My own prediction is that kids born today will never get to drive a car. Autonomous, driverless cars are 10, 15 years out. All the automotive companies — Daimler, GM, Ford — are saying that within five years they will have autonomous, driverless cars on the road.
Q: We’re both baby boomers. We’ve driven all of our lives. How do you feel about kids never having this experience?
A: I love to drive my car, but it’s a question of how much time people waste sitting in traffic and not doing something else. The average person in San Diego probably spends an hour commuting every day. If they could become more productive, that would be good.
With autonomous, driverless cars, we can put twice as many vehicles on the road as we have today, and do it without improving the infrastructure.
Q: Do you see any downside to the evolution of robots? Last year, Google was awarded a patent that involves customizing the personality of robots. There seems to be some disturbing privacy issues there. Or am I reading too much into it?
A: I think we’re going to see robots that are going to learn from you. They’re going to use potentially all of the data that’s available about you.
We would like to build a robot that would help (elderly people) stay in their house another five years. The cost of going to a managed-care facility is somewhere around $80,000 a year. If you could stay in your home, the cost would only be about $20,000.
When we build the robot, we would want it to know: What is your personality? When do you get up in the morning? When do you go to bed? Are you a tennis person? A TV person? I think people would want the robot to be highly customized to them.
The real question is, who else has access to that data? Is it going to be companies like Facebook, Google and Apple? Are we confident that they are not going to abuse that information to try to sell you information, or sell it to somebody else?
Q: You said we have to show that robots can’t be hacked. We haven’t shown that ability in current society, so is this a solvable problem?
A: I think we have been very ignorant about privacy. But we’re getting to a point right where we are starting to pay attention.