Will robots replace human labor in the future?

Will robots take most jobs? A while ago, when we were exhibiting the Mitra robot at an event, a doctor walked up to me and broached on this subject. He was quite strong in the view that we are killing jobs of receptionists, security personnel and so on. I told him politely that doctors like him have put most shamans, black magic healers and village medical practioners out of business. Is that not wrong? To make it worse, their science has removed many diseases and make it hard for other doctors to get business. Dammit you scientific people - destroyer of jobs! And the mother of all job killers in humanity was agriculture. General purpose AI and singularity would not even come near the “chaos” that agriculture created. Until 12000 years ago, our only job was to look for food - from hunting and foraging. Like all animals that was our only thing for all day long. Then these random dudes and dudettes come with their mastery of wild seeds. And before long, food production became a much easy thing. A single farmer in a few acres of land could produce more food than dozens of hunters attacking many square miles of forest. This gave rise to the “horrible” thing known as civilization. Instead of foraging and hunting, most people got involved in other things - like pottery, painting, urban planning, building homes & drainages, administration, mining, jewellery, accounting, medicine… A few thousand years later, another bunch of dudes would start harnessing the power of steam and create “nasty” things like locomotion. Rather than beating our horses to get to the next village, we would get to the other end of the continent reading newspapers. We moved around, explored things. Rather than using little children for many jobs such as chimney sweeping we kept finding better methods. Eventually the horse carriage workers and others moved on to other things. We often confuse general purpose AI with robotics. Robots are no different from any other machine. They destroy no more jobs than your washing machines and music players. Let’s assume the worst case and we have a general purpose AI - that can do everything a human can. What would happen? It would be only as bad as agriculture - that destroyed most of what we did everyday. We could be doing things like sports. In most video games, bots are way better than humans. Does it mean we are less likely to play with other humans? In fact, we would play more with other humans just because the bots are better than us. We would do art, psychiatry and so many more human fields that we have not even created. Just like people could not imagine separate professions like art before the invention of agriculture, we have a problem with imagination. And we would spend more time with our children - who often grow alone with their TVs and more time with our parents - who often rot away alone. But, this is assuming there is a general purpose AI. Robotics is not the same as general purpose AI. We are not creating machines that can do everything. Oh, what about movies like The Matrix and Terminator. Oh, you guys are now giving us Hollywood? If you believe in those weird movies, do you also believe in other dystopian movies like “I’m a legend”? In the latter movie, a germ gets out and wipes out most of humanity. Does it mean we have to close down the pharma and medicine industry? Hollywood can paint a dystopian picture from anything possible. They have even made something as harmless as vacuum cleaners into dangerous things. Should we stop doing all of them? In fact, anything useful can be made dangerous - think fire, water, air, cars, electricity, trains, medicines, petrol, sugar - any of them can kill you very easily. Anything that cannot kill you, is not of much use to you. Robotics, like any major revolution, can indeed cause chaos in the society. No different from agricultural revolution or industrial revolution. There will be displacement. People said the same for computing too. Could the people who were worried about computers doing spreadsheets in 1970s have thought about the whole new industries created by computing 40 years later? But, there are a whole set of important things that are not effectively today and we need robots there. Let me give you some examples of these:

1. A chemical factory explodes releasing harmful compounds that can instantly kill humans. Robots can be programmed to instantly react and in seconds start fixing the problem.

2. An old man is alone at his home unable to fight loneliness or defend from people who are looking to steal from him. Robots can fight loneliness, reduce pain, bring quality of life AND security.

3. A little girl is stuck underneath an unused borewell [happens all the time in the developing world]. Most often they die. Bots could get down and do things humans cannot.

It need not always be life threatening. You walk into most stores now, and it hard to find anyone to assist you. The robots could walk with you, understand your requirements, help you shop and get things on your vehicle. It could play football with your children and take them off TV. I could give you 100s of such examples and that is the future. But, to get there we have to have more simpler robots doing more mundane things. A baby has to go through the toddler stage before becoming an adult. 40 years ago, your parents would not have imagined what you do with computers. They could not have thought of the kind of revolutionary applications that we take for granted. A new revolution is beckoning us. Let’s grab it.