Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #2

What will happen when the robots move from the factory floor or the warehouse and come much, much closer, right to where we eat and shop or even into our homes?

There have been remarkable advances in robots designed as household assistants, service industry providers, and even child and elder care aides.

What will it be like to actually interact with robots and android-type technology as a 'normal' part of day-to-day life? 

Recently two one-act plays were staged at the Japan Society in New York City that attempted to shine a bit of a light on the impending closer level of interactions and relationships between humans and robots that are surely going to be a part of the not-too-distant future. (you can see some excerpts in the video embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

The two plays, "Sayonara" and "I, Worker", show robots as more than just chore completing servants - in a way they are companions or even confidants of the human characters. "Sayonara" featured an android character acting as a poetry-reciting companion to a girl suffering from a terminal illness. In "I, Worker", the robot characters were household servants working in a home in which a young Japanese couple struggles with the loss of a child and the husband's unemployment.

The brief clips from the plays in the video above, and the comments from Japan Society Artistic Director Yoko Shioya shed a little bit of light upon and raise many interesting questions about the (not really that distant) future of human-robot interactions and relations.

On one hand it can be easy and less threatening I suppose to view the relationships that we might have with these kind of advanced robots similarly to how we've always thought about technology - as tools created to perform a task, for increased efficiency, and to make our work and lives easier. Just tools - but more capable.

On the other hand, and what I think these two dramatizations suggest, is the combination of advances in robot technology, capability, and soon - proximity, might lead to a deeper, more complex kind of interaction.  

I am not really sure what the future holds, but it does seem to me there is a pretty significant difference in how we view a robot that solders parts together on an assembly line and one that we utilize to help care for a child or a sick or aged relative.

Brave new world my friends...

Have a Great Weekend!

Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #1

Launching a new series on the blog this week - well not exactly new, since I have been writing about robots, the impact of increased robot automation on workplaces and jobs, and how if we don't watch out, pretty soon all our base will belong to them for quite some time now. But then I figured that the combination of the robot uprising, and my need for a steady source of reasonably interesting content for the blog warranted a more structured approach to collecting, classifying, and most importantly - providing an easy way for our future robot overlords to see that I am, actually, on their side, the future 'robot' content on the site. So then, this is the first 'official' piece in the new series, 'Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising'.

From the 'Jobs that the robots are not really doing, but could easily take over if given the chance' category, I submit for your consideration the 'job' of Entertainment Rreporter.  Take a look at the video below, (yes, it is from The Onion, but don't let that unduly influence your opinion), and then ask yourself honestly if robots could indeed replace all manner of entertainment industry 'journalists': (RSS and email subscribers will need to click through)

iInterviewer: Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola Talk Their New Movie, Inevitable Deaths 

Not that bad, right? And if you leave out the Onion's need to make the interview more of a gag than a true reflection of the typically horrible and banal celebrity interview  - 'How did it feel to work with such a great cast?', then I think you can pretty easily see that a robot, (and not even that powerful a robot), could step in for what passes for the in-depth and biting reporting that most entertainment shows pay high-priced human talent to produce.

I know what you're thinking - this is a goof, it's the Onion after all, and I'll never get back the approximate three minutes I've spent reading this post.

All of those reactions are fair and valid. At least the 'lost three minutes of your life part.'

But if you're still hanging in there with me on this, here's the payoff.

It does not matter what industry, job title, function, or process you are involved in. If what you do is easily repeatable, if the people that do the job are pretty much indistinguishable, and if it doesn't really matter who does the job, only that it gets done - then you or your job is a candidate for the impending robot uprising.

We laugh at the robot interviewing the actors. Until we realize a human reporter would have asked the very same questions.

And not been as funny.