What’s a Robot in 2014? Rodney Brooks and Andrew McAfee Debate
Released on 06/23/2014
I thought to get started
there is a question of
what exactly a robot is in 2014.
The first, what modernly are robots, from 1961.
The Unimate on the left there,
which was in a GM factory in New Jersey.
And these robots followed a series of actions
repeatedly, again and again without sensing
the external environment.
At my current company called Rethink
we have been building a different sort
of industrial robot that is aware
of it's environment, is safe to be close with,
and a line worker not only can be up close with it,
but a line worker can figure out how
to train it to do some task in just a few minutes.
We've seen this sort of thing with Amazon.
The robots going at the shelves
and bringing the shelves to the human picker
and the human picker reaches in
and does the grab and the packing.
I think this is a new sort of robot
that we're going to see more of
by making the robot be tools
that ordinary workers can use.
Are they first going to hit in an
already battered labor sector?
Traditional employment in manufacturing?
That's yesterday's news.
That's been going on for 30+ years.
I think it's more likely to hit
in the part of the work force as you say
that's already been fairly hardly hit
by technology and automation.
It's kind of the lower end of the middle class
is where the real job loss,
the real wage compression has happened.
I think that's likely to continue
because what a lot of lower middle class
workers do is some kind of work
in the physical world.
They're home health aids,
they're cooks, they're working
out there in the world.
Automation is coming to some of those jobs.
Yeah, but I'm worried we're not
gonna have enough robots, really.
Say again?
We're not gonna have enough robots.
There's a demographic inversion happening
where there's gonna be so many more
older people relative to the number
of younger people.
We've never had such a demographic change
in all of human history before.
So providing those services is gonna be
very very expensive.
If you had to guess what the impact
of that demographic change would be,
what would you say?
I think it's where at least a lot
of the low to mid scale jobs are gonna come
in the years ahead.
Just taking care of grandma.
With probably a robot arm that helps
lift her or turn her or do the work
that's hard to do.
But I'm with Rod.
It's going to be a big source
labor and it's not going to be
automated out of existence.
What's interesting is this vision
of it being a hybrid, of the robot
not as a substitute, but as an aid.
Yeah, I see it as people
and robots working together more and more.
The thing that I have really liked most
is when Baxter's gone into some factories
the workers have seen it operating
and then have come to whoever is in charge of Baxter
and said Can we get Baxter to do this job that I hate?
One little plastics factory,
regrinding the misformed parts,
they have to put on a mask.
It's a dirt, dusty job.
They've got a Baxter doing that
24 hours a day now.
That was the election of the people in the factory.
Up until now technology has done
at least as good a job of
creating jobs and creating work
all up and down the income spectrum
as it's done of destroying jobs.
It's been a really happy balance so far.
I personally think that balance might be
about to change.
But that's not gospel at all.
People have been saying that for about 200 years.
It hasn't happened yet.
We thought the PC was gonna eliminate office jobs.
That was one of the things.
It didn't eliminate office jobs.
It changed what office workers did.
Over the long term--
It did.
It eliminated office jobs.
But that wasn't in the first two years.
But the hype cycle was way, way ahead of that.
If you had bought stock in paper companies
at the time we were talking about paperless companies
you'd be owning Wire, you wouldn't just be reading it.
(man on left laughs)
(piano)
(object whooshing through the air)
Starring: Jeff Howe, Rodney Brooks, Andrew McAfee
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