Ready for the robot revolution?

Computerworld ^ | Ahmed Banafa

[2ndDivisionVet]

Progress in robotics, from drones to medical applications, is starting to come at a fast clip. Do you want your robot to cook your food, or just deliver it?

The days of drones filling the sky and robots roaming in our streets are not far removed from reality anymore, and scenes from movies like Star Wars, Minority Report and I, Robot will be common soon. Just consider some of the ways that robots have started to permeate our lives.

Start with Amazon, which is taking to drones in a big way. The online shopping giant started a new phase in high-tech customer service by showing off small drones that it claims will be able to deliver products to consumers in 30 minutes or less. The main goal of this futuristic service, called Prime Air, is to speed up Amazon's delivery times, creating a competitive advantage over other digital marketplaces and traditional stores.

Amazon Web Services could be a model for this army of drones, with Amazon leasing its drones to other companies to deliver their products — CVS for medications, Safeway for groceries, UPS for packages, Pizza Hut for hot food delivery on time, and more.

"One day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today, resulting in enormous benefits for consumers across the nation," the company says...

[MuttTheHoople]

[Celtic Conservative]

I for one welcome our new robot overlords!

CC

[Steely Tom]

To quote a friend of mine: “you will know the robot revolution is here when human prostitutes come under price pressure from robot prostitutes.”

[Darksheare]

Hey G.I. - five dollars for download?

[TChad]

(Amazon) started a new phase in high-tech customer service by showing off small drones that it claims will be able to deliver products to consumers in 30 minutes or less...

...if the delivery drones can dodge the drone-killer drones.

[Darksheare]

“Don’t look now Timmy, but those drones are mating!”
Sure enough, the drones -tired of hunting each other like mindless clanking clockwork myrmidons- had formed a truce and were producing smaller drones!
“Looks like a skeeter swar-Augh!” some poor commentator got carried off by the microdrone fleet for reasons and fate unknown!

[Bratch]

...with Amazon leasing its drones to other companies to deliver their products — CVS for medications

Robot drones delivering prescription drugs...what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

[Rockpile]

We have been able to see drones for decades-———
————just turn on the TV news.

[tumblindice]

Gettin’ jiggy with a robot date-for-hire sounds like a good way to get ‘Bobbitized’!
Remember ‘Westworld’?

[Mike Darancette]

I see robots being used by hospitals to take vitals in the wards.

[Born to Conserve]

It’s already here. Has been for a long time. The first robots and automation have displaced the underclass — they can’t hope to get a job. The lowest working classes are about to be displaced in large numbers with ordering kiosks and automated food prep. Students and the elderly are goners. I think the breakeven is somewhere around $15/hr now. It will go up. If you make less than $25/hr, you’ve got about five years. Ten years from now, most long haul truckers will be robotic. Traffic cops are also on the extinction list — cars will have self reporting, on board supervision. It will keep getting worse until the first computer designed computers are produced, then skynet will be self aware. That will be about 2035.

[GeronL]

and nobody will have a job

[Nowhere Man]

I think by that time where no one will have a job, there will be a move to provide everyone with a living wage just by being alive where it will be enough to get a basic house/apartment, car, etc., and have enough change to go out to dinner every so often much like Star Trek, The Next Generation. It's either that or as a society, there will be pressure against the use of robots, even to the point to where they could be outlawed for jobs a human can do with the exception of hazzardous jobs like inspecting the inside of atomic reactors and so forth. I'd favor the latter, idle hands are the Devil's workshop.

I think there is a side of me where this will be moot, between the proliferation of cellphones, the internet and now these robots, we are building a modern day Tower of Babel where if there are hits take on a few key parts of the whole thing such as from an atomic war, natural disaster on a near global scale or just plain bum luck, the whole thing will come crashing down and we will be thrown back to something resembling a mix between the late 1800's to about 1950 or so. As much of a geek as I am, there is a side of me that welcomes that, we are becoming too dependent on that stuff and I think we are seeing a ruination of society accelerate. My late mother said "we are not ready for all of this technical stuff" and I think she is right. If God came down and offered me a button to stop cellphones and the internet and return us to a world resembling the 1950's to 1980's, I would do it.

[Ditto]

Not to mention the virus they could download. ;~]

[Ramius]

So we should have people in certain simple repetitive jobs merely in order to keep an underclass employed? There’s no chance that there might be something else they can do?

[Ramius]

It’s too bad that most science fiction has filled our imaginations with nothing more than a future dystopia: That technology is dangerous, just for making life better.

[Nowhere Man]

So we should have people in certain simple repetitive jobs merely in order to keep an underclass employed? There’s no chance that there might be something else they can do?

We might have to do that out of realism and pragmatism. I'd probably do what they do in India. They used hundreds or thousands of men with shovels to dig holes, IIRC even for their atomic bomb tests, instead of machinery when they are able to just to keep people employed. I keep thinking of what Grandma said, "idle hands are the Devil's workshop" (or in the case of India since they are mostly Hindu, "Kali's workshop"). You can't have people sit around and do nothing, not everyone is a robotic engineer and even so, there would only be so many jobs in that field. This is where I break off in agreement with the general conservative thought, in some ways, the economy is a zero sum game.

[Nowhere Man]

AS much as I like and wish for the world of Steely Dan’s “IGY,” it ain’t gonna happen. B-(

[Ramius]

Nonsense.