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The Evolution of Robots: Rapid Advances But Humans Need not Worry Yet
Robots are evolving, and the evolution is being led by the military, fulfillment operators like Alibaba and Amazon, and Chinese startups developing devices to enable low-cost manufacturing.
Rodney Brooks, a robotics pioneer, chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, and inventor of the Roomba robotic vacuum, said that “the robot industry is squarely stuck in the 20th century…[but] there are so many little startups coming along that things are going to happen, so start worrying because hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs are coming… A lot of these China startups are low-end manufacturers of cheaper light industrial robots with six-degrees of freedom, dragging prices down so it’s hard for U.S. and European companies to compete there… we can scoff at their level of innovation, but it’s only a matter of time before it increases.”
But Brooks says not to expect robots to replace all tasks that humans can do, at least not any time soon. He said that “I recently saw a story in MarketWatch that said robots will take half of today’s jobs in 10 to 20 years. It even had a graphic to prove the numbers. The claims are ludicrous. (I try to maintain professional language, but sometimes …) For instance, the story appears to say that we will go from one million grounds and maintenance workers in the U.S. to only 50,000 in 10 to 20 years, because robots will take over those jobs. How many robots are currently operational in those jobs? Zero. How many realistic demonstrations have there been of robots working in this arena? Zero. Similar stories apply to all the other categories where it is suggested that we will see the end of more than 90 percent of jobs that currently require physical presence at some particular site.”
