Rodney Brooks, MIT professor, iRobot cofounder and Technology Review commentator, was waxing poetic about the promise of robotics in a recent TR column, comparing the state of robotics today with the state of computers in 1978, claiming that in another 15 years, robotics will be as ubiquitous as email and the web.
I’m reminded of an article I read by Nils Nilsson in 1984 about “Artificial Intelligence, Employment, and Income” that claimed that as AI systems were able to do more and more, there would be fewer and fewer jobs for humans to do, and thus we should consider dissociating income from employment and set up some kind of trust so that people whose jobs were eliminated through AI advances could still earn income from the work these systems were performing.
I don’t believe that AI has achieved the level of dominance that Professor Nilsson expected in 1984, and I don’t believe that robotics will achieve the level of dominance that Professor Brooks expects in 2004 (or 2019). In particular, he says that
Robots with the vision capabilities of a two-year-old and the manipulation capabilities of a six-year-old will be more disruptive to our way of life than any robot portrayed by the governor of California. They will reorder the world labor markets that have developed over the last 50 years. They will change immigration patterns and the massive shift of labor from developed to developing countries. But the most important impact might well be on elder care: caregiving robots could help us weather the tsunami of aging baby-boomers about to submerge the economies of Europe, North America, and Japan. But more on that in a later column. For now, suffice it to say: the robots are here.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I wouldn’t want a machine with the vision capabilities of a two-year-old and the manipulation capabilities of a six-year-old to be care for my mother in her golden years.