I don't really see a significant answer to my rather rhetorical questions
Read below, maybe I can help to shed light on the subject.
@Insensitive Thanks for the genuine reply...
Much like global warming was a misnomer for climate change, robots are a misnomer for automation.
I said Technology advances because it's silly to think the automatons will be limited to one or 2 rudimentary tasks.
I never said it would be.
I was just addressing the misconceptions in this thread on the broad field of robotics.
"Robots" can be anything from a rover on mars to a humanoid machine like Asimo
or the pre-programmed robotic arms at a Honda factory that bolt car doors on.
Robots have and most likely will continue to be designed for a specific set of tasks
or goals that need to be accomplished. This sort of specialization is obviously for a
reason and this is because it lowers complexity as well as costs.
Ben Goertzel has written extensively about "Artificial General Intelligence" and this is
MONUMENTALLY more difficult (this REALLY cannot be understated) than writing software
that is meant to do a very specific thing.
This is the reason we have machines like Watson that can drum up facts
in an instant (and would best the very best fact memorizing human) but would struggle
at other tasks we consider trivial.
Some are throwing out fantasies akin to flying cars in this thread.
Where Robots will replace entire work forces and moon light as engineers, it's
just something I don't see happening in any reasonable amount of time.
"Robots making robots" for example was stated in the last thread, we'd require a
machine that has a general intelligence and is teachable before we'd ever get to
the point that machines are designing other machines, let alone taking
over the vast majority of jobs people can and do work.
Why is it far fetched to think
Won't be automated...
The video you put in the spoiler tag isn't showing up.
BUT I do see the name of the of machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System
It's meant to facilitate the surgeons expertise, the sort of expertise
built up from working on dozens of patients and spending many years
in medical school. These are the sorts of things you can't just program, a task
like surgery is more complex than sorting mail or telling someone what's in
their banking account and is probably a pretty good example of a task that'd require
machine intelligence. "Automation" as you suggest would probably
never work for a counselor or sheriff or even a surgeon.
As a someone who studies robots and ai, you have to be down right aloof to ignore the fact that all of these technologies will eventually converge.
You speak of power sources for said automation as if the fastest processors of today don't use significantly less electricity then the humongous mainframes of decades past.
*I don't want to mislead anyone, Robotics/AI is an interest of mines
that is all, I won't sit here and say I'm a hardcore student or anything of that sort.
As for what you mentioned about technology, I don't get what you mean about
"eventually converge", if these technologies hadn't
already converged in one way or another
there wouldn't be any robotics to talk about.
And I never said that these technologies wouldn't, what I'm saying here, is there isn't really
anything on the horizon that indicates that that'll be happening soon and if ONE technology
makes a quantum leap, it still needs to wait for everything else. Processors for example
are now incredibly fast and we've reached the point that they trump the average person when it comes to mathematical computation several times over but that same monster PC would have difficulty discerning things that Dogs and Cats can do EASILY.
Or as you stated in your post, power sources.
Say we want a robotic repair man to come to our homes to check out problems.
He'd need to not only have some level of intelligence to complete the task but a power
source of some sort that'd allow the robot to complete it's task without shutting off within
the hour after it arrives.
And battery technology for all the strides it's made recently would
still need to get significantly better before it could be used to power
robots.Though there are highly expensive experimental materials on the horizon like
graphene which could help not only batteries but could replace silicon in the coming decades.
And of course any industry wide replacement could take quiet a long time.
This is an interesting example of graphene being used to increase battery efficiency:
http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jan13/graphene11613.html
On top of that, Robotics is a combination of several different disciplines.
It isn't JUST fast processors.
It isn't JUST smart program design otherwise all those "Chat bots" who pass the
"Turing test" would be actual AI.This is why I chuckled at the Eugene post because
it didn't exhibit any true intelligence, if it did, then that'd be a truly incredible feat and
a step towards the marxist robotics driven heaven describe in this thread.
It isn't JUST aesthetics, it's design that not only has to look nice but it has to
be functional, all of these require their own levels of expertise.
Function is difficult already as it is because if the robot is meant to fill
a specific task then it has to have a designer or a team of designers
to prototype, test, etc. and that means it could take years before
the machine ever hits the market or even begins to take jobs.
All of these different disciplines rely on specific technologies and some
of these technologies like batteries are a long ways from where they need to
be before we're seeing the sorta stuff described in this thread.
Obviously, everyone can't be a specialist or a troubleshooter of all this automation...and that IS the point of this thread; the ever-increasing pyramiding of money, jobs, and power. And ultimately, to program automation to troubleshoot other automation isn't overly as complex as people make it seem either.
My point is, and subsequently my problem is people need to be cognizant of this and the potential implications it has for humanity. Most people aren't. (No Robopocalyse)
The problem with this, is that it assumes that all of these very huge engineering
problems will just up and vanish, which is something I brought up in this very thread
and have been talking about the entire time.
Am I saying that jobs will never be automated ? NO.
In fact in the last thread, I agreed, certain jobs will be automated
but I feel that as the task that needs to get completed gets more complex
then the likelihood of it being lost to robots drops and in my opinion
it's a significant drop.
I think transhumanism is a farce but time doesn't stop.
I don't think it time stops either, I just think people are understating just how
difficult something like this would be. Causing a mass exodus out of the work force
through creating incredibly complex machines that can handle all of the hundreds of
different tasks that people take on daily and are paid for,literally reads like science fiction
with little to no concern for what would have to actually take place before we ever get
to that point.
Don't get me wrong, when and if it happens, I'll gladly welcome it.
I've just tempered my expectations after looking at the reality of robotics.
We'd have to solve several engineering problems before "Robots"
