Robotic Nation?

What he talks about is happening now. And it's hard to really see how big of a deal it will become without looking at the big picture.

When I go to the local Farmer Jack to get groceries, nearly half of the check out lanes are self checkouts now. When I get my gas, it's also done without dealing with a human. ATMs are nothing new but you can see where things go. In the article, Mr. Brain (yes, that's really his name) talks about a recent experience at McDonalds where they ordered from a kiosk rather from a person.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine if every fast food restraunt was able to replace the 4 to 6 people working on any given shift with machines that allowed people to just order for themselves. According to the last census, something like 10 million people work in the fast food industry. You could see 8 million of them elimiated in less than a decade. What's going to replace those jobs?

But that's really only the start of the process. Mr. Brain talks about the next big leap for technology -- fast imaging. When I was in college, I worked at Old Kent Bank as a "Proof operator". When you write a check to someone, it eventually comes back to your bank. My job was to read the chicken scratch put on by us humans and put in the bank number and amount that was then encoded onto the check so that a machine could read it. But by my Junior year, that job had gone away. The new proof machines from Unisys had such powerful imaging systems on them that they could read the handwriting of 98% of people correctly. Today, virtually all checks are done this way. So my summer job was gone (so I went and founded Stardock to pay the bills but I'm not sure that is a general solution for people).

But such machines are big and hugely expensive. But in time, imaging will be something that is nearly perfect and available on devices very small. Why is this a big deal? Because imaging recognition combined with robots like those from Honda (which will only get better in the coming decades) will create machines that can do all kinds of manual labor. Cleaning hotels, streets, restraunts, etc. At some point, a good chunk of the staff in the service industry will be replaced by machines. Not in the near future but in the next 30 to 50 years almost certainly.

The same is true with the manufacturing sector. If one thinks machines are replacing manufacturing jobs now, wait until the machines can "see" and "recognize" things. That's been the real stumbbling block for machines in the workplace. Without visual recognition, there is only so much they can do. Add in voice recognition and you have a pretty useful unpaid menial worker.

Now, some people may say that 50 years is too soon. But imagine where things were in 1900. No airplanes. No cars. Etc. By 1950 we had supersonic flight, nuclear weapons, television, movies, radio, etc. 50 years. And the pace of technological breakthrus is only increasing. The Internet, as we know it today, didn't really exist in a recognizeable form until a little over 10 years ago. Now, I can access the net from my portable cell phone.

So it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that within 50 years we'll see a lot of these things come to pass.

The question is, what will all those people do?