The first problem with “robots” is how you pronounce the word. Does it rhyme with Bobo the clown or with “so what”? Considering that the shortened form is ’bot, ‘so what’ seems more likely.
A whole lot of people have started asking the same question about the sudden boom-time for robots. This is partly provoked by newer applications they are being put to. A Bank of America-Merrill Lynch (BoA-ML) study says that robots will usher in “a fourth industrial revolution, after steam, mass production and electronics”. The 300-page report comes to the conclusion that “a robot revolution will transform the global economy over the next 20 years, cutting the costs of doing business but exacerbating social inequality, as machines take over everything from caring for the elderly to flipping burgers”.
There is a catch: Would you trust a robot to operate on your brain or even give you the right medicine? Flipping burgers is all very fine in an assembly line operation, but what happens when something goes wrong? Remember the Charlie Chaplin classic Modern Times. You can end up with a quarter pounder (a QP ‘buffalo’) when you have ordered a Mc Aloo Tikki – a bestseller in India. If the Sri Ram Sena could attack a fast-food outlet for selling chicken burgers, just think of what they would do to one which had beef on the menu.
To get back to robots, however, there are two points of view. First, they will make things better for mankind by taking over the dull, routine jobs. Second, they will lead to joblessness. The drone in the factory will be replaced by remote-controlled robots that Google and Amazon are experimenting with. That’s what the origin of the term robots suggests.
The word was brought into the English language by Karel Capek who wrote about such automata in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). But the concept was around since much earlier; some postulate that Samson of Christian mythology was a robot, his end coming when Delilah fiddled with his neurological circuits contained in his hair.
Popular robots were conceptualised by Isaac Asimov, the creator of the Robot series. He also came up with the three laws of robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Asimov found his laws too constraining. So he came up with a zeroth law, which basically gave his robots the freedom to do what they felt like.
If you thought all this was fiction, real life has examples that can make you goggle. According to a report in online publication Knowledge@-Wharton: “When an earthquake hit Los Angeles recently, Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was first to get the news out. Woken up by the tremors at 6:25 a.m. on Monday, March 17, he went to his computer and found a brief story already waiting, courtesy of a robot -- an algorithm he had developed and named Quakebot.”
“Robots are likely to be performing 45 per cent of manufacturing tasks by 2025 versus 10 per cent today,” says the BoA-ML report titled “Robot Revolution – Global Robot & AI Primer.” It estimated that the robots and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions market will grow to $153 billion by 2020, with robots and robotics grabbing an $83 billion share and AI-based analytics taking $70 billion worth. Global sales of robots topped $10.7 billion in 2014, with China, the US, Japan, Korea and Germany accounting for 70 per cent of the market.
