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I For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords

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I For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords

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Lately, there's been alot of talk on the internet about robots and "AI" taking away 200% of the jobs in the country in the next few years and I'm not quite sure why that's a thing all of a sudden. We haven't had any recent huge breakthrough in AI and as far as I know robots still can't quite be left alone with small animals. But every news outlet is talking about it, and university professors are betting that your job right now is on its way out the door. I mean, it's a good paper for sure. Very scientific and it draws upon some well known principles and facts. So panic and then panic some more, human. I for one, am not ready to believe a word of it just yet though, but I do have some points to back it up, if you bear with me.

If you follow the interwebs like I do, you've probably seen it. The Boston Dynamic prototypes that run like man, fall like man and get up and wipe themselves off, kind of. They look something like this.

Pretty impressive. And pretty hilarious at times. Much of their computing power probably goes into keeping them stable and upright, for some reason. If we just added two more legs, the biped would never fall, and if it were just a rectangle on wheels, well then he'd rule the world. And I'd the quadruped version needs an impressive amount of power to maintain its 25mph pace. Gimmick aside, there are several reasons why you won't be seeing these robots out in the wild anytime soon. And then I'll make a few points on why maybe we could use a little more automation in our lives and why that's not such a bad thing.

Why Your Job Is Safe

Humans Are Complex Machines Too

So humans have gotten pretty good at doing a variety of things, after millions of years of evolution and survival of the fittest and such. Some of those things, we take for granted, like walking, analyzing situations, surviving in water (big one) and using our hands for pretty much everything. For example, I can go to the fridge and pour a glass of water. Easy enough. There's probably 2 robots in the world right now that can do that one specific task. And that's a huge issue in the robot world conquest plan. Robots can't move an inch without a program to tell it to do so. Whereas humans are designed to write these programs themselves as they walk around their day to day lives. We are designed to find food and survive and to learn from our environments in order to do so. Where as current robots are mainly designed to "Walk from point a to point b", "Pick up object a and move it to location b", etc. And while learning programs have been written for these robots, they're still pretty rustic as far as technology is concerned.

And unless there's a huge AI breakthrough that I am unaware of, and one that's somehow compatible with every walking robot right now, then we can probably rest a little easier.

Humans Are Really Good At Metabolizing Energy

The cool thing about humans, is that they run on food, plants and trash and such. Much like future Deloreans do. The average adult human runs off of about 2000 calories per day. And what are calories? 5th grade science class. It is the amount of energy required to heat up 1 gram of water to 1 degree Celsius. Humans can run, think, find more food and rest using these calories. Where as robots currently require electricity from battery packs. And alot of it. Giant battery packs that weigh 10lbs and that can provide maybe half an hour of power before said robots passes for a brief time. Tragic it is. Honda's Asimo for example has an estimated run time of about 1 hour before it needs to be recharged.

And also unfortunately, these batteries aren't cheap. Give a human a 30 minute lunch break, in which they pay for their own "fuel", and they'll work for a full 8-10 hours. But repeatedly charging a robot is both time consuming and more expensive than eating a granola bar. Humans can continue to work while they recharge and then some.

Software Fails..Alot

I've read more than a few articles mentioning how in 10 years office jobs will be obsolete because software will be doing the work for us. Software written by, you guessed it, people like me. Software developers. Not built by sentient machines, but by Bill, Chuck, Steve and everyone else in the 10 x 10 unlit room in the back of your office. I've yet to work on a website in which I didn't wonder whether I've made terrible life choices and whether I should just move to a farm.

Software isn't perfect. That's why you still sit at work and loudly press on your keyboard to express frustration whenever things aren't going your way. It's hard to teach a robot that "We add 2 to this field here, because that client is awesome, and give them a little break sometimes". Computers don't do well with "awesome" and "sometimes". They either do, or they don't. But that's not how business run unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.

We Don't Trust Machines

Pretty much any job that requires driving will still require humans, because for the most part we're still pretty untrusting of our robot drivers, even though they've proven safe time and time again. But there's big money in insurance and car accidents etc etc. Imagine a world without any car accidents? I know right. Ridiculous. So more than likely it will be a good long while before most of us are whisked off to work while we enjoy our morning hologram papers.

This Isn't New

There was once a time where in order to make a phone call you first had to talk to a stranger somewhere in some part of the world, and she would connect a wire in order for you to establish that connection. True story. We don't need to do this anymore, and the job market didn't collapse. Computerized switchboards took over, and so people stopped seeing this as a career option and moved on to something else.

When ATM's first hit the scene, people assumed that bank tellers were going to lose their jobs also. Now we know that ATM's just allow for more customers in a day and the tedious task of entering a 12 digit account number and then double counting random bills for accuracy is no longer a problem to worry about. Go to any bank at any point in the day, and there will still be people lining up to conduct their business. The same goes for self-checkout machines at grocery stores. Everyone I know pretty much avoids using them due to the inconveniences that still plague them.

Jobs You Might Lose

Anything With Basic Math

I used to have managers that would spend days working on reports and writing Excel Macros in order to do some pretty basic math operations on data. And it was all well and good and for the most part they did a decent job. At some point in that work timeline, I ended up automating those reports with a few lines of code. Nothing too crazy. Just querying the database, writing to a file, storing said file, and then sending an email with that file attached to several important people. Never again did this manager have to spend days on this task, and he was grateful for it, as it wasn't the funnest time that he's had. And every now and then, he still had to go back in and fix reports manually. Data gets corrupted, servers go down, and sometimes it's just nice to double check your work.

Delivery Jobs

Drones have been huge lately. And companies are fast testing them out for package deliveries. Amazon is at the forefront of this and they are also one of the largest consumers of delivery companies. It's only a matter of time before they select a region for beta testing and then expand and expand until it becomes the norm. The good news is that this will probably take a long while. There just aren't enough drones in order to fulfill such a demand. And companies like FedEx and UPS have spent decades perfecting their delivery techniques.

There is plenty of room for automation in our current world. There are still plenty of jobs or tasks that are just repetitive motions that don't require any real type of skill to accomplish. And others which are just downright too dangerous for humans to continue to do, such as mining and working in industrial facilities.

One Day Robots Will Be Stocking Our Shelves

Just because it's not happening now, doesn't mean it won't happen in the future however. Robots are getting better at picking up objects of different sizes and getting up when they fall down. And eventually they'll be good at many other things as well. But, so will humans. Many of the assumptions being made currently about robots taking over the job sector is based on the idea that people will remain at their current jobs in this static limbo of a society. But as we all know, things don't necessarily work that way. By the time that machines are ready to pack up boxes and move them for us, we'll be busy working on whatever the next big thing is. Jobs change based on the need of the society and it's foolish to think that in 30 years humans will be still be driving on the 405 in order to go sit in their cubicles. Machines and software do replace jobs, yes, but its done so at a very gradual pace. It for sure isn't overnight. That would be disastrous and would probably make for a good movie.

Feel free to leave your take on it, or conspiracies on it, down below!

Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.

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