Rise Of The Droids: Will Robots Eventually Steal All Of Our Jobs?Michael Snyder, Contributor In the past, I have written extensively about how millions of American jobs have been sent to the other side of the world, but now we may be moving into a time when workers all over the planet will be steadily losing jobs to super-efficient robots. For employers, robots provide a lot of advantages to human workers. Robots never complain, they never get tired, they never need vacation, they never show up late, they never waste time of Facebook, they dont need any health benefits and there are a whole lot of rules, regulations and taxes that you must deal with when you hire a human worker. In the past, robots were exceedingly expensive, and that limited their usefulness in the workplace, but as you will see later in this article that is rapidly changing. As robots continue to become even more advanced and even less expensive, will there eventually come a point where the human worker is virtually obsolete? Of course I can hear the objections already. Many of you will insist that even though automation has always eliminated jobs in the past, it has also always created new jobs that were even better. For instance, once upon a time most of the U.S. population worked on farms, but thanks to automation now hardly any of us do. But what happens when we get to the point where super-intelligent robots are more efficient at everything? What will be left for human workers to do? And a lot of the jobs that are disappearing thanks to advances in technology are fairly high paying jobs. In fact, one recent study of employment data from 20 countries discovered that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But that advantage is disappearing right in front of our eyes. For example, one company has produced a new robot called Baxter that only costs $22,000. The following is from an article about Baxter in the MIT Technology Review Baxter was conceived by Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist and artificial-intelligence expert who left MIT to build a $22,000 humanoid robot that can easily be programmed to do simple jobs that have never been automated before. Eventually, the goal is to produce versions of Baxter that will perform tasks even more cheaply than Chinese workers do Brookss company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a renaissance in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency thats eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand. The ultimate goal is for robots like Baxter to take over more complex tasks, such as fitting together parts on an electronics assembly line. A couple more ticks of Moores Law and youve got automation that works more cheaply than Chinese labor does, Andrew McAfee, an MIT researcher, predicted last year at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, where Baxter was discussed. So it wont just be American workers that will be displaced by robots it will literally be workers all over the planet. In the future, when you call someone for customer service you probably wont be talking to someone in India. Instead, you will probably be talking to a robot. In fact, this transition is already starting to happen IPsoft is a young company started by Chetan Dube, a former mathematics professor at New York University. He reckons that artificial intelligence can take over most of the routine information-technology and business-process tasks currently performed by workers in offshore locations. The last decade was about replacing labour with cheaper labour, says Mr Dube. The coming decade will be about replacing cheaper labour with autonomics. IPsofts Eliza, a virtual service-desk employee that learns on the job and can reply to e-mail, answer phone calls and hold conversations, is being tested by several multinationals. At one American media giant she is answering 62,000 calls a month from the firms information-technology staff. She is able to solve two out of three of the problems without human help. At IPsofts media-industry customer Eliza has replaced Indias Tata Consulting Services. Even some of the largest companies in China are starting to make the transition from human workers to robots. The following is from a recent TechCrunch article Foxconn has been planning to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers and it looks like that change, albeit gradual, is about to start. The company is allegedly paying $25,000 per robot about three times a workers average salary and they will replace humans in assembly tasks. The plans have been in place for a while I spoke to Foxconn reps about this a year ago and it makes perfect sense. Humans are messy, they want more money, and having a half-a-million of them in one factory is a recipe for unrest. But what happens after the halls are clear of careful young men and women and instead full of whirring robots? So what will the world look like as robots begin to replace humans in just about every industry that you can imagine? A recent Wired article described what this transition might look like First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. After robots finish replacing assembly line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses. Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and vegetable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots, starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually getting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs. All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in many of our machines; we just dont call it that. Witness one piece of software by Narrative Science (profiled in issue 20.05) that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games stats or generate a synopsis of a companys stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic. The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesnt matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic. I dont know about you, but the phrase robot takeover is not exactly comforting. Perhaps I just watch too many movies. In any event, as technology advances there will eventually be very few jobs that robots cannot perform. In fact, you might be surprised to learn some of the things that robots are already doing. The following is from a recent Yahoo News article Google and Toyota are rolling out cars that can drive themselves. The Pentagon deploys robots to find roadside explosives in Afghanistan and wages war from the air with drone aircraft. North Carolina State University this month introduced a high-tech library where robots bookBots retrieve books when students request them, instead of humans. The librarys 1.5 million books are no longer displayed on shelves; theyre kept in 18,000 metal bins that require one-ninth the space. So what will the3.1 million Americans that drive trucks do for a living once robots are driving all of our trucks? What will the 573,000 Americans that drive buses do for a living once robots are driving all of our buses? And eventually even our skies may be filled with robotic drones that are busy performing one task or another. Just check out what a recent Time Magazine article had to say about the emerging drone industry But the drone industry is ramping up for a big landgrab the moment the regulatory environment starts to relax. At last years Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Las Vegas, more than 500 companies pitched drones for filming crowds and tornados and surveying agricultural fields, power lines, coalfields, construction sites, gas spills and archaeological digs. A Palo Alto, Calif., start-up called Matternet wants to establish a network of drones that will transport small, urgent packages, like those for medicine. In other countries civilian drone populations are already booming. Aerial video is a major application. A U.K. company called Skypower makes the eight-rotored Cinipro drone, which can carry a cinema-quality movie camera. In Costa Rica theyre used to study volcanoes. In Japan drones dust crops and track schools of tuna; emergency workers used one to survey the damage at Fukushima. A nature preserve in Kenya ran a crowdsourced fundraising drive to buy drones to watch over the last few northern white rhinos. Ironically, while the U.S. has been the leader in sending drones overseas, its lagging behind when it comes to deploying them on its own turf. Unfortunately, many people will not understand what I am really trying to get at in this article. Even if that is true, they wont need hundreds of millions of us to build them. No, the truth is that when human workers become obsolete, those that dominate society with technology will look at the rest of us as useless eaters that are not contributing anything to society at all. Already, there are many economists that are warning that advancements in technology are steadily reducing the natural employment rate. And we are already seeing this happen in the United States. As I wrote about the other day, the percentage of the labor force that is employed has declined every single year since 2006 2006: 63.1 In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed. Of course there are certainly a lot of factors involved in why those numbers are declining, but without a doubt technology is playing a role. So what do we do with all of the workers that are being displaced? Are we just going to put everybody on food stamps? Will the gap between the rich and the poor grow even larger than it is today? Will most people eventually become dependent on the government in order to survive? We are moving into uncharted territory, and nobody is quite sure what comes next. As time goes by, robots will even start to look more like us. In fact, this is already starting to happen. Just check out the following description of a bionic man that has been created from a recent article in the Guardian He cuts a dashing figure, this gentleman: nearly seven feet tall, and possessed of a pair of striking brown eyes. With a fondness for Ralph Lauren, middle-class rap and sharing a drink with friends, Rex is, in many ways, an unexceptional chap. Except that he is, in fact, a real-world bionic man. Housed within a frame of state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs is a functional heart-lung system, complete with artificial blood pumping through a network of pulsating modified-polymer arteries. He has a bionic spleen to clean the blood, and an artificial pancreas to keep his blood sugar on the level. Behind the deep brown irises are a pair of retinal implants, giving him a vista of the crowds of curious humans who meet his gaze. He even has a degree of artificial intelligence: talk to him, and hell listen (through his cochlear implants), before using a speech generator to respond. As robots become more like us, will we eventually become more like them? Will we be told that we must merge with the machines in order to keep up and be useful in society? What will happen to those of us that refuse to merge with the machines and that refuse to enhance ourselves with technology? Will we be outcasts? Those are some important questions. Feel free to share your thoughts on those questions by posting a comment below RELATED ACTIVIST POST ARTICLES: This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 