Opinion - iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks announced he is leaving his position as CTO to form a new robotics company. While the new company's focus and direction will not compete with iRobot's products, they will be competing with you. Brooks wants to change the way robots are used in today's labor markets. That means his robots will be in, and you will be out.
Brooks said in an online statement, "I want to effect a powerful evolution in the world's labor markets, and my current focus is to develop low-cost robots that will empower American workers."
Empower American workers? How would having your manufacturing job replaced by a robot empower you to do anything other than become useless to society, unless of course they need more people to sell hamburgers at the local fast food restaurant? But then again, with more of your neighbors also being replaced by low-cost robots, who would have money to buy fast food hamburgers? Let alone regular food?
Pros and cons
The world is not black and white and this announcement may not be either. So let’s look at the pros and cons for the robot labor force. I includ things such as robots' production at 24/7/365, lower long-term costs of maintenance and upkeep (especially considering the continuous production in operation), that robots are adaptable through programming, completely reproducible by just making another one, turning it on and installing the appropriate software, and that since they're made of interchangeable parts, they are easily serviced and maintained.
Robots are also scalable in size, speed, number and strength. They require only a small base of manpower expertise to keep a great many of them working. And it may even be possible to create robots that will fix other robots, requiring even a smaller base of manpower expertise to keep only the "repairer bee" robots going as it were.
Man's benefits
Humans, on the other hand, have two things going for them that robots don't. First, humans are more flexible and adaptable to new things as we learn very quickly and can do a wide range of tasks very well. This does become a liability at high volume, however. While it might take a programmer a few months to reprogram a robot to do a new job well (or not), once the programming is perfected it could be rolled out simultaneously to hundreds of millions of robots. They'd all be perfect workers overnight whereas every person would require retraining, and not all of them would learn as quickly or perform as well at the new task.
Second, we're self-sufficient. A group of people could be dropped off pretty much anywhere on the habitable planet and within a short period of time some successful system would be established that would allow for all facets of living and such.
In truth, from a purely business point of view, that's really about the extent of the human's advantages over machines.
Man's weaknesses
On the other hand, humans have a plethora of known weaknesses. We tire more easily, require sleep, relaxation, recreation, vacations, have family needs, and even the best of us get sick from time to time or have personal wants and wishes which may keep us from being the best workers, the most productive or whatever. How often have we seen our fellow man crying, or taking a day off work because of life?
People matter
The real fact here is that it's not about money or productivity or pushing technology as far as it can go. The truth is people are what matters. It's about the people. Good or bad, tall or short, thin or thick, people are what's important. And that is a fact that these robot labor designers do not seem to even care about or consider, apart from their marketing department which creates statements like "to develop low-cost robots that will empower American workers." How many times have we heard similar phrases related to American jobs going to foreign workers?
Conclusion
Businessmen like Brooks, those who would place value on money and productivity ahead of individual men, have drifted so far away from what's truly important that one thing becomes very clear: There's an agenda. And to me, it's one designed for one purpose only: To decrease "average man's" role in the world by reducing the population to that of a worker force required only to service the robot's owners' needs. "Go, fix that robot. Go, do this. Go, do that."
Notes
iRobot, the company Brooks is stepping down as CTO from, was just awarded a US$200 million contract to supply the U.S. Army with "robots, parts and services". Brooks has also recently stepped down as director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the writer.