YOU WILL LOSE YOUR JOB TO A ROBOT

R
ecently there has been a lot of discussion about futuristic wars between humans and robots, robots
taking over the world and enslaving humans. Movies like The Terminator, Star Wars, etc., have
propogated these ideas faster than anything else. These movies are beautiful works of fi ction and
present us with an interesting point of view to speculate. However, the truth is much different but equally as
interesting as the fi ction. If you look around yourself you will see several machines and gizmos within your
surroundings. When you use a simple pair of spectacles, do you become nonliving? When an elderly person uses
a hearing aid or a physically challenged person uses an a rtifi cial leg or arm do they become half machine? Yes,
they do. Now we are rapidly moving toward an era where we will have chips embedded

I
want to tell you straight off what this repport is
about: sometime in the next 40 years, robots are
going to take your job.

I don’t care what your job is. If you dig ditches, a

robot will dig them better. If you’re a magazine
writer, a robot will write your articles better. If
you’re a doctor, IBM’s Watson will no longer
“assist” you in finding the right diagnosis from its
database of millions of case studies and journal
articles. It will just be a better doctor than you.And
CEOs? Sorry. Robots will run companies better than
you do. Artistic types? Robots will paint and write
and sculpt better than you. Think you have social
skills that no robot can match? Yes, they can. Within
20 years, maybe half of you will be out of jobs. A
couple of decades after that, most of the rest of you will be out of jobs.

In one sense, this all sounds great. Let the robots have the damn jobs! No more dragging yourself out of
bed at 6 a.m. or spending long days on your feet. We’ll be free to read or write poetry or play video
games or whatever we want to do. And a century from now, this is most likely how things will turn out.
Humanity will enter a golden age.
But what about 20 years from now? Or 30? We won’t all be out of jobs by then, but a lot of us will—
and it will be no golden age. Until we figure out how to fairly distribute the fruits of robot labor, it will
be an era of mass joblessness and mass poverty. Working-class job losses played a big role in the 2016
election, and if we don’t want a long succession of demagogues blustering their way into office because
machines are taking away people’s livelihoods, this needs to change, and fast. Along with global
warming, the transition to a workless future is the biggest challenge by far that progressive politics—not
to mention all of humanity—faces. And yet it’s barely on our radar.

That’s kind of a buzzkill, isn’t it? Luckily, it’s traditional that stories about difficult or technical subjects
open with an entertaining or provocative anecdote. The idea is that this allows readers to ease slowly
into daunting material. So here’s one for you: Last year at Christmas, I was over at my mother’s house
and mentioned that I had recently read an article about Google Translate. It turns out that a few weeks
previously, without telling anyone, Google had switched over to a new machine-learning algorithm.
Almost overnight, the quality of its translations skyrocketed. I had noticed some improvement myself
but had chalked it up to the usual incremental progress these kinds of things go through. I hadn’t
realized it was due to a quantum leap in software.

R
OBOTICS inside our bodies. Chips will communicate with our biological sensors and will help us in
performing several activities more effi ciently. An artifi cial retina is almost at the fi nal stages of its
development. Now we are thinking in
terms of nanobots helping us to strengthen our
immune systems. Now we are already on the verge of
becoming half machine. Chips will be implanted
inside our bodies imparting telescopic and
microscopic abilities in our eyes. Cell phones will be
permanently placed inside the ear. We will
communicate with different devices not through a
control panel or keyboard; rather these devices will
receive commands from the b rain directly. The next
level of development will be the part of the brain
being replaced by chips, which will impart more
capability to the brain. You may ask, do we need all
these? The answer is that the biological evolution has
already become obsolete. It is unable to keep pace with the rate at which humans are growing. Many of our
primary intuitions, such as mating behavior, are still millions of years old. Evolution happens only after millions
of years. But humans have built the entire civilization in only 10,000 years. And now the rate of growth has
become exponential. Now we need to replace our brain’s decision-making software with faster/better ones. So,
where are we heading? Yes, we are slowly becoming robots. Robots are not our competitors on this planet. They
are our successors. Robots are the next level in evolution; rather we can call it robolution. We will begin our
journey with a brief history of robotics.

HISTORY OF ROBOT
Timeline

Date Significance Robot Name Inventor

First Descriptions of more than 100 machines and automata, Ctesibius of Alexandria,
century including a fire engine, a wind organ, a coin-operated Philo of Byzantium,
A.D. and machine, and a steam-powered engine, in Pneumatica Heron of Alexandria, and
earlier and Automata by Heron of Alexandria others

Boat with four

1206 First programmable humanoid automatons robotic Al-Jazari
musicians

Mechanical
c. 1495 Designs for a humanoid robot Leonardo da Vinci
knight

Mechanical duck that was able to eat, flap its wings, and
1738 Digesting Duck Jacques de Vaucanson
excrete

Japanese mechanical toys that served tea, fired arrows,

1800s Karakuri toys Hisashige Tanaka
and painted

1948 Simple robots exhibiting biological behaviors[31] Elsie and Elmer William Grey Walter
 Programmable universal manipulation arm, a Unimation
1975 PUMA Victor Scheinman
product

Dedicated robots
Main articles: Domestic robot and Industrial robot

In 2006, there were an estimated 3,540,000 service robots in use, and an estimated 950,000 industrial
robots. A different estimate counted more than one million robots in operation worldwide in the first
half of 2008, with roughly half in Asia, 32% in Europe, 16% in North America, 1% in Australasia and
1% in Africa. Industrial and service robots can be placed into roughly two classifications based on the
type of job they do. The first category includes tasks which a robot can do with greater productivity,
accuracy, or endurance than humans; the second category consists of dirty, dangerous or dull jobs which
humans find undesirable.

Some examples of factory robots:

 Car production: Over the last three decades automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A
typical factory contains hundreds of industrial robots working on fully automated production lines, with
one robot for every ten human workers. On an automated production line, a vehicle chassis on a
conveyor is welded, glued, painted and finally assembled at a sequence of robot stations.

Dirty, dangerous, dull or inaccessible tasks

A U.S. Marine Corps technician prepares to use a telerobot to detonate a buried
improvised explosive device near Camp Fallujah, Iraq

There are many jobs which humans would rather leave to robots. The job
may be boring, such as domestic cleaning, or dangerous, such as exploring
inside a volcano. Other jobs are physically inaccessible, such as exploring
another planet,] cleaning the inside of a long pipe, or performing
laparoscopic surgery.

 Telerobots: When a human cannot be present on site to perform a job because it is dangerous, far
away, or inaccessible, teleoperated robots, or telerobots are used. Rather than following a
predetermined sequence of movements, a telerobot is controlled from a distance by a human operator.
The robot may be in another room or another country, or may be on a very different scale to the
operator. For instance, a laparoscopic surgery robot allows the surgeon to work inside a human patient
on a relatively small scale compared to open surgery, significantly shortening recovery time.[48] When
disabling a bomb, the operator sends a small robot to disable it. Several authors have been using a
device called the Longpen to sign books remotely.] Teleoperated robot aircraft, like the Predator
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, are increasingly being used by the military. These pilotless drones can search
terrain and fire on targets.[50][51] Hundreds of robots such as iRobot's Packbot and the Foster-Miller
 TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military to defuse roadside bombs or
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in an activity known as explosive ordnance disposal (EOD).

Research robots
See also: Robot — Robot Research

While most robots today are installed in factories or

homes, performing labour or life saving jobs, many new
types of robot are being developed in laboratories around
the world. Much of the research in robotics focuses not on
specific industrial tasks, but on investigations into new
types of robot, alternative ways to think about or design
robots, and new ways to manufacture them. It is expected
that these new types of robot will be able to solve real
world problems when they are finally realized.

Fig:-A microfabricated electrostatic gripper holding some silicon nanowires.

 Nanorobots: Nanorobotics is the still largely hypothetical technology of creating machines or robots at or
close to the scale of a nanometer (10−9 meters). Also known as nanobots or nanites, they would be
constructed from molecular machines. So far, researchers have mostly produced only parts of these
complex systems, such as bearings, sensors, and Synthetic molecular motors, but functioning robots have
also been made such as the entrants to the Nanobot Robocup contest. Researchers also hope to be able to
create entire robots as small as viruses or bacteria, which could perform tasks on a tiny scale. Possible
applications include micro surgery (on the level of individual cells), utility fog, manufacturing, weaponry
and cleaning. Some people have suggested that if there were nanobots which could reproduce, the earth
would turn into "grey goo", while others argue that this hypothetical outcome is nonsense.
 Soft Robots: Robots with silicone bodies and flexible actuators (air muscles, electroactive polymers, and
ferrofluids), controlled using fuzzy logic and neural networks, look and feel different from robots with
rigid skeletons, and are capable of different behaviors.

Reconfigurable Robots: A few researchers have investigated the possibility of creating robots which can alter
their physical form to suit a particular task, like the fictional T-1000. Real robots are nowhere near that
sophisticated however, and mostly consist of a small number of cube shaped units, which can move relative to
their neighbours, for example SuperBot. Algorithms have been designed in case any such robots become a reality.
 Fig:- A swarm of robots from the Open-source Micro-robotic Project

 Swarm robots: Inspired by colonies of insects such as ants

and bees, researchers are modeling the behavior of swarms
of thousands of tiny robots which together perform a useful
task, such as finding something hidden, cleaning, or spying.
Each robot is quite simple, but the emergent behavior of the
swarm is
 more complex. The whole set of robots can be considered as one single distributed system, in the same
way an ant colony can be considered a superorganism, exhibiting swarm intelligence. The largest swarms
so far created include the iRobot swarm, the SRI/MobileRobots CentiBots project [66] and the Open-
source Micro-robotic Project swarm, which are being used to research collective behaviors.[67][68] Swarms
are also more resistant to failure. Whereas one large robot may fail and ruin a mission, a swarm can
continue even if several robots fail. This could make them attractive for space exploration missions,
where failure can be extremely costly.[69]
 Haptic interface robots: Robotics also has application in the design of virtual reality interfaces.
Specialized robots are in widespread use in the haptic research community. These robots, called "haptic
interfaces" allow touch-enabled user interaction with real and virtual environments. Robotic forces allow
simulating the mechanical properties of "virtual" objects, which users can experience through their sense
of touch.[70]. Haptic interfaces are also used in robot-aided rehabilitation.

this represents an important and dangerous trend in which humans are handing over important decisions
to machines.

Marauding robots may have entertainment value, but unsafe use of robots constitutes an actual danger.
A heavy industrial robot with powerful actuators and unpredictably complex behavior can cause harm,
for instance by stepping on a human's foot or falling on a human. Most industrial robots operate inside a
security fence which separates them from human workers, but not all. Two robot-caused deaths are
those of Robert Williams and Kenji Urada. Robert Williams was struck by a robotic arm at a casting
plant in Flat Rock, Michigan on January 25, 1979. 37-year-old Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker,
was killed in 1981. Urada was performing routine maintenance on the robot, but neglected to shut it
down properly, and was accidentally pushed into a grinding machine.
 ADVANTAGE AND DIS ADVANTAGE OF ROBOTS

Advantages of robots:

The advantages of human substitution by the robot are eminently immense and
infinite. Since without the help of this the human being would not have been able to evolve
to the point that we have now arrived.

The robot uses, advantages and disadvantages

 Thanks to the robotics, the human being has been able to dedicate his time to
improving the quality of life by applying it constantly and replacing himself in
repetitive and exhausting tasks.

 Robots allow researchers to understand some functions impossible to unravel

directly through animal experimentation.

 They are programmable multifunctional manipulators with various degrees of

freedom, capable of manipulating materials, parts, tools or special devices,
according to variable trajectories programmed to perform various tasks.

 Any mechanical device capable of reproducing human movements for the

manipulation of objects is used.

 Educational programs use robot control simulation as a teaching medium.

 We can mention the multi-robots as those capable of adapting to different fields

of work.

 For the owners of the factory, the fact of having automated processes gives
several benefits in terms of production, which we mentioned above, such as
lower manufacturing costs and more efficient resolution (speed and quality).
Disadvantages of robots:

 The time of product development through industrial robots is minimal, with which
important companies stimulate the constant purchase by thousands of people
throughout the world, encouraging a capitalism that can become stressful.

 Thousands of people throughout the world lose their jobs because they are replaced
by industrial robots.

 When starting a company that needs these machines, it takes a lot of initial capital
because they are very expensive.

 They consume a lot of energy in a factory, which translates into a significant new cost
to pay. Currently, it can be seen that unemployment due to human substitution by
robots has been greater than the employment it has created. This is mainly due to
the fact that many pasts

 Generations could not compete with the potential of the robots, that is why they
were replaced and expelled from this specific work area.

 These thinking computers are only considered as a base of a kind of intelligent robots
capable of creating copies of themselves.

 The cost of a robot remains constant with low reduction.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND EXAMPLES

The name behind the idea of AI is John McCarthy, who began research on the subject in 1955 and assumed that
each aspect of learning and other domains of intelligence can be described so precisely that they can be simulated
by a machine.

Even the terms ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘intelligent human behaviour’ are not clearly defined, however.

Artificial intelligence describes the work processes of machines that would require intelligence if performed by
humans. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ thus means ‘investigating intelligent problem-solving behaviour and
creating intelligent computer systems’.

There are two kinds of artificial intelligence:

• Weak artificial intelligence: The computer is merely an instrument for investigating cognitive processes – the
computer simulates intelligence.

• Strong artificial intelligence: The processes in the computer are intellectual, self-learning processes. Computers
can ‘understand’ by means of the right software/programming and are able to optimise their own behaviour on the
basis of their former behaviour and their experience. This includes automatic networking with other machines,
which leads to a dramatic scaling effect.

ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE IN ETHIOPIA

Humanoid Sophia makes real impact on young Ethiopian AI enthusiasts

ADDIS ABABA－Sophia, the famous humanoid robot, on Tuesday met with more than 200,000 young
artificial intelligence enthusiasts as part of her visit to Ethiopia's capital.Sophia, who arrived in Addis
Ababa on last Friday, had missed much of her
schedule as a bag containing some of her parts
went missing at Frankfurt Airport. On Tuesday,
Sophia attended the 2nd International Information
Communication Technology Expo Ethiopia 2018,
which is under way in Addis Ababa on the theme
"Transform Ethiopia".

I-cog Labs, an Ethiopian AI company that had

been involved in the development of Sophia's
software, facilitated the meeting between the robot
and young Ethiopians.

Getnet Aseffa, I-cog Labs CEO, said on Tuesday that Sophia, which has more than 2 billion followers
globally, met a huge gathering of enthusiastic fans. Developed by Hanson Robotics and activated in
2015, Sophia was granted Saudi citizenship in 2017, making her the first robot to receive citizenship of
any country. Sophia is also regarded as the "realest" robot to date. According to Aseffa, his company has
been working in partnership with Hanson Robotics for the past four years, during which time they were
able to contribute to the development of the brain parts of Sophia. "One of our contributions is that we
built what you see as the emotional activities, expressions and also an engine called cognitive engine,"
Aseffa said. "There are parts of Sophia that perceive the environment. For example when Sophia
observes a crowd, she would perceive a gathering, a meeting, an event or expo. Such types of decisions
are made by her cognitive brain." According to Aseffa, the fact that Ethiopians have contributed to the
making of Sophia could be seen as a major factor that motivates and inspires young Ethiopians in the AI
sector. "They (the children) have started thinking that we are not locked in Ethiopia and we can have a
big impact in the world," he said. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who met Sophia at the
Ethiopian National Palace on Monday, called on young people to embrace developments in the AI
sector, saying the country has thousands of "brilliant minds" that could help integrate with the future of
software development and AI sectors.

Notes and references

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original on 2008-07-14.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070202121608/http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_bot.html. Retrieved on 2007-
09-05.
2. ^ "About us". http://www.emrotechnologies.com/.
3. ^ "Your View: How would you define a robot?". CBC News. 2007-07-16.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/technology-blog/2007/07/your_view_how_would_you_define.html.
Retrieved on 2007-09-05.
4. ^ "Real Robots on the Web". NASA Space Telerobotics Program. 1999-10-15.
http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/realrobots.html. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
5. ^ "The Grand Piano Series: The History of The Robot". Nimbus Records.
http://www.wyastone.co.uk/nrl/gp_robot.html. Retrieved on 2007-09-08.
6. ^ Marc Perton (2005-07-29). "Roboraptor review - this one has teeth (in the discussion below, several
people talk about RoboRaptor as being a real robot.". Engadget.
http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/29/roboraptor-review-this-one-has-teeth/. Retrieved on 2008-08-
07.