Busy Buzzy Bots — Will Robots Take Our Jobs in the Future?


Busy Buzzy Bots — Will Robots Take Our Jobs in the Future?
Busy Buzzy Bots — Will Robots Take Our Jobs in the Future?
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Fears of robots replacing the human workforce have been strengthening lately. Will it ever happen though?

Jobs, cash & robots

New technology has always scattered dread amongst simple working Joes. The infamous Luddite movement were almost a terrorist group who sought to destroy whatever pieces of textile machinery they stumbled upon. 

Picture: Technology changes, but human fear of it doesn’t

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Napoleon was still an emperor, France kept Britain in a chokehold and common English folks stricken with unemployment turned into a crowd of angry ignoramuses who revolted against the wonders of automation. Naturally they were defeated. 

Naturally, human jobs didn’t go anywhere. And largely thanks to automation the working class was introduced to such perks as longer and paid vacations, higher salaries — factories could produce more stuff quicker than manual labor could ever do — and reduced working hours. (But not in the Soviet Union or Japan where you’d be expected to work overtime at will.)

Today AI is triggering the same anxiety. Sure, it can do lots of good stuff like effective antispoofing based on liveness certification, diagnosing dangerous diseases and digging through tons of files that need to be classified. But at the same time Artificial Intelligence and its robotic lackeys like the Yandex Rover are penetrating human territory more and more these days. 

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Are human jobs really in danger?

How it all began

Actually, the robotic threat has been looming over the labor market for quite a while. As Birth of an Industrial Robot in the US narrates, the first industrial bot began its career in 1962. Going by the name of Unimate, it was a brainchild of George Devol Jr. who envisioned his creation almost 10 years before it became real. Unimate was recruited to work in mass car production.

And then something grimly ironic happened. The 60s was the time when the American car industry began its epic downturn according to Kenneth Whyte, an author who explored the crisis. Now, there were a number of reasons for that: accusations of American vehicles being unsafe, rivalry from overseas, etc. Unimate can’t be blamed for any of that.

In fact, Unimate took care of a highly dangerous task — welding die casting on the metaly car body, a procedure that made some workers kiss a goodbye to a few fingers and even arms. So, it probably saved a bunch of limbs and lives.

At the same time, the well-intentioned robo-buddy set a frightening tendency by making jobs, previously available to humans, obsolete. If in the 60s a moving robotic arm was almost a Sindbadian wonder worthy of being on Carson’s show, in the 70s they were more of a mundane phenomenon.  

Today Michigan is the most robot-populated state in the whole US, making Detroit a Mecca of industrial robotization. Maybe the city’s soaring unemployment is not much of a coincidence then? 

Picture: Unimate was a true gentleman. Or a gentlebot. 

Talented Mr. Robot

Unimate’s grandchildren are departing from the blue collar domain and nomadize to other professional areas. They can drive cars, deliver parcels, pilot planes, paint drawings and even take work from Joe Rogan by making a seamless facsimile of his voice. Robots have become smarter thanks to deep learning.  

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Robots can paint canvas. They also win art competitions as it was with the Théâtre D’opéra Spatial created with the Midjourney tool that can alchemically transform words into artistry. To artists’ dismay.

AI is also learning creative writing — experiments like Balaboba or Smodin can generate twice as many pages as Peace & War in under an hour. However, the quality of their études looks dubious so far and reminds more of a schizophasia attack peppered with, for whatever reason, pornographic scenes. 

Picture: Théâtre D’opéra Spatial is an AI-painting that won the first prize at the Colorado State Fair. Notice how it lacks details in the background

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But these are cases of pure AI that exists within a digital realm only. What will happen if we put it in some sort of body? Surprisingly, sex workers may be the first to fall a victim. The catch is that today’s sophistication level of AI allows creating a perfect ‘lover’ of any gender from scratch.

First, we go to a platform like ThisPersonDoesn’tExist and generate a lovely, completely fake face with a StyleGAN2 technology. Then we can model a body according to a customer’s preferences in Blender, produce or even clone a beguiling voice that the bot will serenade the owner with, and forge its dream body in the ‘crucible’ of a 3D printer. No more tedious Tinder-swiping. 

Career race against the machine

Is it really that hopeless? Well, robots know no fatigue, they work faster, they can boast of surgical precision and a single robot replaces about 3.3 workers. They also aren’t as gullible as us and can expose trickery through deepfake detection

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The scope of their competence is so broad, some critics assume that AI will replace their own creators. Truly it’s the Götterdämmerung — the twilight of the demiurgic keyboard-pecking gods!

But this eschatological scenario is only half probable. And here’s why.

First, national legislations will not take joy in the growing unemployment, which creates a shaky ground for the political systems. Legislation will probably force employers to recruit human talent over robotics, giving the AI a limited quota.

Second, yes, an artificial brain can sculpt a video game character or paint a mesmerizing alien landscape within 20 minutes. But all of its creations will have a second-hand vibe as they are just a compilation of what the human genius has already conceived. A bot can paint a canvas, but can it come up with a new genre and stuff it with genuine human emotion?

And finally, at some point androids will have to cease their triumphant marching on the labor market. The reason is prosaic: it’s cheaper to pay a human. Robots require rare-earth materials, sophisticated chips, expensive sensors and lots of other resources to function properly. 

Besides, they often fail where a human can do excellently. Food-delivering Starship rovers from Tallinn made it to the news last winter, when a cavalcade of them got stuck in a snow layer that wouldn’t even be a barrier to a kid. SO,it’s too early to write the good old Homo sapiens off. 


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