Get a GRIP! Robolution ain't happening until TOUCH is cracked Predictions are rife about the millions of repetitive, administrative and operative roles set to be decimated by automation over the coming years. Robots could undoubtedly make a positive contribution to the UK's pitiful levels of productivity and make up for the dearth of people willing to take on the many tedious roles most …
that will fund you know...
The Dole
The NHS
The Military
and
My Pension (for what little it is worth)
The likes of Walmart, Amazon and the rest will pile into this because it reduces the non recurring costs (i.e. Human Staff) and their profits all in one go. Naturally, the profits won't be real profits. They will be squirrelled away in some tax-haven via some 'double Irish' form of licensing.
Then the country goes bankrupt because there is no money for the Government to pay for even a damp tissue to wipe away their false tears.
We are doomed I tell ye doomed.
Not really.
You can call them "robots" if you want, but at least for the moment, they're just automated machines. And machines of various types have been replacing manual labour for centuries.
Claims like this have been made since the Luddites first started throwing spanners in the works of cotton mills.
Claims like this have been made since the Luddites first started throwing spanners in the works of cotton mills.
Indeed. But if we automate a load of the manual labouring jobs, what exactly will those people do? In previous rounds of automation there were plenty of other demands for manual labour; I'm not so convinced that's the case if we can make technology that will replace warehouse packers, fork lift drivers, truck and van drivers etc.
I can't see that we'd train many techies from those currently performing manual jobs, and even if we could there's not going to be an equivalent number of jobs created in coding, app design and the like.
"I'm not so convinced that's the case if we can make technology that will replace warehouse packers, fork lift drivers, truck and van drivers etc."
Converting ports to containers put 100's of 1000's of manual dock workers out of work. It's still a hell of a wrench and definitely not nice for those involved, but it's survivable.
My fingertips are continually self-repairing, replenishing their surface from the inside outwards. (My fingertips will also adapt, becoming harder over days if regularly play a guitar or build a brick wall - becoming less sensitive in the process. )
How to implement this continual repair in a robot hand? I don't know, but perhaps a regular service will include spraying a polymer layer on the robot's finger tips. Sensors in the fingertips will analyse the thickness of polymer that has been deposited in real-time, providing feedback to the spaying robot.
The alternative might be for the fingertips to periodically excrete a polymer that is quickly (UV?)-cured, though off the top of my head this approach might risk blocked 'pores'.
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That isn't actually fruit, for robots to pick up where a sense of touch doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for a box, or for something with a known size/shape (like a fast food burger, for instance)
That will encompass the replacement of a LOT of jobs before the robot overlords' cold dead hands come to take your job that currently needs warm live hands.
"They may just hijack criminals bodies for x years and hack into the nervous system. May be cheaper."
Frederick Pohl beat you to in in "We Purchased People".
Looks like the amateur at Shadow Robotics was right all along. Theirs used rubber balloons in stocking bags as pneumatic muscles. Limited maximum strength but very high strength/weight ratio, so they did a complete set of muscles, like a real human forearm (somewhere around 60 actual muscles in there).
IIRC the SoA in conventional manipulators is one that can pick up a cherry from a mound of cherries and put them on top of a cake.
Used 2 soft(ish) rubber belts and probably a fair bit of fine tuning on the materials selection for the belts.
Once the robot can pull apart two tightly stacked two-by-two Lego flats without effort or braking either piece I'll be happy to say that they are Up To Scratch, until then, meh.
Oooh - and picking up a needle from the floor! once robots can do that I won't be needed at home at all!
"Robots could undoubtedly make a positive contribution to the UK's pitiful levels of productivity and make up for the dearth of people willing to take on the many tedious roles most likely to be affected."
Or you could simply cut the dole and reduce taxes on working Brits.
Robots are crap because software is crap, and always will be. The sooner your polititards realize that, the better off your country will be.
""Robots could undoubtedly make a positive contribution to the UK's pitiful levels of productivity and make up for the dearth of people willing to take on the many tedious roles most likely to be affected."
There's a story on the BBC, quoting the TUC saying how hard working people are, even when they're ill. Sadly for TUC, the same BBC article points out that time lost to sickness is 1.7% in private sector, yet 2.9% in public sector. Probably not the message the TUC was trying to convey, though.
Interestingly, same article reports higher absences from smokers. You'd think, what with all those little breaks during the day .. :-)
You're right. The human hand is an amazing tool, but for a robot, it may well be better to have multiple interchangeable "hands" for different jobs, including tentacles. You just have to look at automated production lines to see the many and varied ways already in use for handling all sorts of tasks Something like a human hand but heat/cold/acid resistant and the option for the "bones" to change from rigid to flexible to make it even more adaptable might be nice.
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