Half a billion years ago, Earth’s animal life rapidly evolved during the event known as the Cambrian explosion. In the future, growing swarms of robots all talking with one another could spark a similar “Cambrian explosion” for robotic evolution. A robotics expert who has worked for the U.S. military recently published a paper on the technological changes that could rapidly spawn the next generation of robots powered by advanced artificial intelligence. He also weighs the consequences of robots rapidly replacing huge numbers of human workers.
Two technologies could play the biggest roles in rapid robot and AI evolution, according to Gill Pratt, who has served as robotics program manager for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). First, “Cloud Robotics” could allow robots to share experiences and knowledge through wireless connections and the Internet. Second, “Deep Learning” algorithms allow robots to learn from experience and apply those lessons to more general scenarios. Together, they could lead to more capable robots with the AI brains to handle many more jobs currently done by humans, according to Pratt’s paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
“While a Cambrian Explosion in robotics promises to improve the human condition dramatically, it also looms as a disruptive economic force, in part because of its much-discussed potential to make certain human jobs redundant,” Pratt writes. “Yet there is reason to embrace the pending robotics revolution despite such concerns.”
They Took Our Jobs
The Cambrian explosion of robotics could lead to swarms of capable robot workers replacing many human workers in a very short time. That rapid change could easily have a disruptive effect by leaving many people jobless and without much value to offer to the new economy. Eventually, a robot-driven economy might actually satisfy the traditional human demand for goods and services and eliminate the demand for additional labor. Such a world might end up looking like today’s music business; an economy that offers “superstar wages” to a few highly talented people and only pays low levels of income to the rest.
Still, Pratt points to a few possible ways out of humanity’s future dilemma. First, some human services and products will probably sell for higher prices than cheaper robotic alternatives. Today’s examples include hand-crafted goods and live music tickets that sell for higher prices than machine-made goods or music recordings.
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