A farmer selling carrots is sure that carrots will become more important in the near future.
Yeah, I’m downplaying these “news”. I want to see it happen, not hear marketers blabber about it.
The person making this claim, Peter Chen, is the founder of a successful robotics firm, Covariant, that already sells robots. Here are some of their robots in action packing meal kits. I think this gives his claims some weight and credibility.
Understandably enough, people often focus on the human job loss implications of this. But there are also other economic challenges. A world where robots and AI do more and more of the work formerly done by people will be a world of constant deflation. By eliminating human wages from production, everything they produce will get cheaper.
Many people don’t appreciate it, but deflation is extremely destructive to how our economies are run. Over time it grows the size of debts relative to incomes and creates recessionary conditions that then often spiral into further problems. My guess is that we are going to start hearing a lot more about this in a few years.
If people are used to a price for a product, the price won’t drop just because manufacturing became cheaper. Only the profits will rise.
Not the job losses we were expecting
A tech ceo is talking up their technology with romanticized language and sweeping claims? Gosh the world must be about to change drastically, better go buy stocks, ceos never ever do this very easy very free marketing.
Honestly, just looking at the steady progress Boston Robotics has made in the past 20 years, it’s fairly easy to see the progression in what their robots are capable of, particularly in the mobility dept.
Even without a breakthrough and just continuing at a slow and steady pace, we’re not that far off here.
I expected them in the year 2000, so there’s no chance they come sooner than I expected.
I don’t know. After a skim I don’t see a lot of supporting evidence (basically just “people are working on it”). It’s still hard to turn a physical interaction into a dataset you can run through 10,000 times a second in serial.
It’s pretty telling that self-driving cars still suck years and billions of dollars later, and that’s easily the best common physical task for automation.
If the same approach that lead to a “rapid advancement in ‘AI’” is used… it sounds like theyre going to make robots that look highly functional but suck. Then they’ll sell that to Wall street and the easily convinced public, and in 2 years we can realize they failed! Hoooray!!
As with all robotics and automation news: call me back when farming is fully automatic.
