> Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?
If current trends continue, it will be the capitalist who first commercialized the robot once public and private R&D had done all the heavy lifting.
If current trends continue, it will be the capitalist who first commercialized the robot once public and private R&D had done all the heavy lifting.
There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots. Even the most magical electric self-driving car requires maintenance in the form of software updates, tire rotations and the like.
I think we are entering a period of "super industrialization", where even fewer workers are needed to do greater amounts of work. Careful care needs to go into making sure we don't enter the age of "robber barons" again, but I think a careful review of history and thoughtful policy decisions can guide us into this new era.
A tool is so much more versatile than a die press stamping out the same object over and over. Tools imply flexibility and adaptability to different circumstances.
I think automation will happen from the bottom up. Some plumbers use cameras and nitrogen gas to detect leaks. Soon, they'll use robots to detect and repair leaks. They'll get better and faster, requiring less and less oversight. The natural consequence of that, the guy with the good tools can fix more stuff in a day.
Similarly, a self-driving car fleet will require repairs and maintenance, as well as regulators who will ensure safety compliance (whatever those saftey measures are).
In any case, its the industrial revolution again. We're replacing legions of factory workers with machines. Rent-seeking occurred in the late 1800s / early 1900s as children were used to control absurdly powerful machinery (and put into dangerous situations... and paid extremely cheaply for it).
We need to ensure proper economic growth while balancing the needs of future workers... ideally while allowing older workers to transition their skills to the economy somehow.
Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot.
In my experience automation tends to have very mechanical edges, so the very act of automating something brings about a system that is easier to automate further.
And who's job is it to make sure that these maintenance robots actually are doing their job?
We basically have 100% automated webpages, providing services and automatically updating themselves. (Puppet, Aptitude, etc. etc.). Even the process of buying new computers to hook into a webpage's processing system has been automated "through the cloud" with Heroku, Amazon Web, and OVH Servers.
And yet, you still require roughly one IT guy every 100 servers, to make sure that those servers are actually running. (+/- whatever, based on skill-level and maturity of the project)
I mean, the best-case scenario for a maintenance robot is something like Nagios, which will automatically check if various web services are still up and running.