> They're not created by people who like the world and want it to be a better place. They're created by people with lots of money who want a lot more. ... They'll do this by persuading everyday people to not do things like produce, prepare, and transfer food themselves and instead pay money for these robots to do it.
This is an extremely negative outlook. I'm a robotics and controls engineer for a small (25-employee) integrator, our company mission is to make lives and products better, and I really think that everyone believes in that. Our meager budgets and slim, fluctuating profit margins are evidence that it's not all about "lots of money"...there are certainly those making a killing on it but it's not everyone. And maybe Upton Sinclair was correct, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about this (and not just in response to news articles, I took ethics and philosophy courses to pad out my gen eds on my way to my engineering degree, I've read books on the topic, and I've talked to lots of other engineers, my customers, the operators who have been transitioned from old equipment to run my new automated equpment...). But I stand by my argument that humans are no good replacement for robots, and robots are no good replacement for humans. The tech needs to be employed judiciously, but it can be used for good.
I've installed equipment in dozens of places where life was made better: There were less than 90 fingers among a lunch table at the foundry with 10 guys at it (4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 lost digits) when I installed a robotic grinding cell that removed parting lines from valve castings, now they can ergonomically load infeed shuttles and have time to quality check the parts from behind a safety fence; no more fingers have been lost. Two older women (One with arthritis!) at a plastics company no longer have to keep up with placing a tiny foam spacer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, with a half-hour lunch and 2 15-mintue breaks...that's nearly torture, and it was a really challenging material handling problem, but the robot does it well. The operators now pour in bags of foam spacers, do offline quality checks more frequently (catching upstream problems quicker, leading to less waste), and basically pour bins of parts into the machine and get one assembly out every 1.75 seconds now. Two weeks ago, I was training a 64 year old seamstress (she retires in 8 months and 24 days) on the operation of an automated sewing machine. She's been pushing fabric through a sewing machine, keeping it between 3/8" and 5/8" on the seam allowance, since she was 16 years old. Now she lays out fabric on the infeed table - she's pleased that she finally has time that doesn't impact production rates to make sure the patterns match precisely - and she inspects the stitching on the product that comes out the outfeed chute to adjust thread tensions and strokes on the sewing machine. Literally Tuesday of this week, I was at a wood processing plant installing a new automated saw, when I heard that a 19-year-old greenhorn lost his right index finger between the first and second knuckles on an old manual saw. I was there installing the fully automated, fully guarded replacement equipment; you can drop a pallet of roughsawn lumber on the infeed material handler and correctly sized boards come out the other side, with no one needing to be closer than 20 feet from the saw blade. I wasn't fast enough.
In all these cases, no one got fired, people just transitioned from mindless, repetitive grunt work to real human work, while capacity and efficiency increased. And not only are all these operators enjoying their jobs more, your gas is cheaper, new cars are cheaper and more reliable, new furniture is cheaper and the cushions are more consistently sewn, and solid-wood cabinet doors are produced more safely, accurately, and quickly. It's not all about capital.