Robots do it better

Last December 2008 IEEE Spectrum published an interesting brief article , called “The Rise of the Machines” by Erico Guizzo, about the world wide penetration of robots in the industry.

It seems that the growth curve for this type of “employment” is quite steep as the robot workers population is expected to rise to 1.2 million by 2011.

The actual situation sees already 1 million robots employed in a wide range of industry realities.

As one could expect the leading countries are Japan, Singapore and South Korea but, quite surprisingly, Europe countries -Germany, Sweden and Italy mainly- keep the pace and the region is that with the highest machine/worker ratio (50/10K).

International Federation of Robotics takes also in consideration  service robots for personal and professional use. The 2008 summary report estimates an increase of 54K new units of professional robots (defense&security, medical, logistic, etc..) for the 2008-2011 period.

Personal use (consumer) robots will grow of about 12.1 million units. Robots belonging to this class are much more commonly spread than the professional and industrial ones. Their field of operation varies from domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning, and so on) to entertainment and leisure robots (toy robots).

How will the balance of humans and machine influence and shape the increansingly interconnecting relation between orga and mecha? How will our society react to the progressive invasive movement of more and more sophisticated machines in fields that were -and still are- monopoly of humans? It’s just behind the corner the day when robots will take care of our elders or disabled people, perform many low and -I foreseen- medium end jobs, look after our children and perform as erotic companions. How will all this influence the human-to-human relations? It’s difficult to precisely foreseen such a future but I’m sure machines -not just robots- will continue to change life and society as we know it.

Illustration: Mike Vella

The Robotic Intelligence

Today’s Boing Boing newsletter highlighted an interesting suggestion about the sometimes called theme of “Rise of the Machines”.

Boing Boing didn’t supplied much information about it so I did a hyper-quick research myself.

In 1997 Hans Moracev , an Austrian born is a research professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a paper about artificial intelligence on the Journal of Evolution and Technology.

“When will computer hardware match the human brain” discusses about how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. on extrapolation of past trends and on examination of technologies under development it estimates the processing power and memory capacity necessary to match general intellectual performance of the human brain. The conclusion of Moracev is that the required hardware to fulfill such purpose will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s.

Robotics and AI are two very interesting subjects which will have an increasing impact -much more than it’s commonly thought- on our lives and our society. Considering the fast and steep improvement of the information technology in the last say 30-40 years and the magnitude of it in the everyday life -especially starting from the time the web began to interconnect with people lives- we can expect that advanced machines will modify the social life the way we know and live today. Machines working in the fields of house keeping, health-care, law enforcement, versatile low profile workers and (maybe) lovers, will be available to the consumer and industry.

Will it be a better world? I tend to say yes because I trust machines more than humans, but will the “rise of the machines” be deprived of dangers? To this I’m a bit concerned. The lack of advance concepts in the legislation field could produce unclear and dangerous situation. We already see this with the Internet and the run for a last-minute legislation effort that, by trying to fix some already accustomed social behaviour (as the concept of a free web environment), produced aberrations like those to limit the file sharing and enforcing the people control by spy-like systems.