CoVID-19 and the use of robots – AI Daily

Back to the OG video. Scientists at the University of Liverpool have unveiled a robotic colleague that has been working non-stop in their lab throughout lockdown. The 100,000 programmable inhuman researcher learns from its results to refine its experiments. "It can work autonomously, so I can run experiments from home," explained Benjamin Burger, PhD student at the University and one of the developers of the robots. Dr Burger jokingly added, "It doesn't get bored, doesn't get tired, works around the clock and doesn't need holidays." Such technology could make scientific discovery "a thousand-fold faster", scientists say. A new report by the Royal Society of Chemistry lays out a "post-COVID national research strategy", using robotics, AI and advanced computing as a part of a set of technologies that "must be urgently embraced" to assist socially distancing scientists continue their look for solutions to global challenges. Future science historians will mark the start of the 21st century as a time when robots took their place beside human scientists. Programmers have turned computers from extraordinarily powerful but fundamentally dumb tools, into tools with smarts. Artificially intelligent programs make sense of knowledge so complex that it defies human analysis. They even come up with hypotheses, the testable questions that drive science, on their own.

For better or worse the robots are about to replace many humans in their jobs, analysts say; coronavirus outbreak is just speeding up the method. "People usually say they need an individual's element to their interactions but Covid-19 has changed that," says Martin Ford, a futurist who has written about the ways robots are going to be integrated into the economy within the coming decades. "[Covid-19] goes to vary consumer preference and really open up new opportunities for automation." Companies large and little are expanding how they use robots to extend social distancing and reduce the quantity of staff that need to physically come to figure. Robots are also getting used to performing roles workers cannot do at home. Walmart is using robots to scrub their floors, fast-food chains like McDonald's have been testing robots as cooks and servers in a service where the health concern is highest. After all this, it is evident that the majority of the jobs that are available to the general people like us are temporary, insecure, and badly paid. Nevertheless, with the advent of using more robots in the workplace, there will be an unjust, unfair and unacceptable distribution of income. Just for the sake of health concerns, the use of robots increased exponentially. All of this is that version of future which haunts the experts of AI.

While automation is likely to foster overall economic prosperity, it comes at the price of increasing inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic is reinforcing both the trend towards automation and its effects. The main challenge here is to ensure that as many as possible will benefit from the positive economic and social effects of automation to prevent a situation in which a substantial part of society is disconnected from the gains brought by technological progress. There are still many things that they will never be able to do better than humans, and there are still more that they will not be able to do as cheaply. We are yet to discover the full range of these things, but we can already find out the key limitations to what robots and AI can do.

First, there appears to be a high quality in human intelligence that, for all its wonders, AI cannot match, namely its ability to influence the uncertain, the fuzzy, and the logically ambiguous.

Second, due to the innate nature of human intelligence, people are extremely flexible in being able to perform umpteen possible tasks, including those that were not foreseen at first.

Third, humans are social creatures instead of isolated individuals. Humans want to deal with other humans. Robots will never be better than humans at being human, and so I conclude- there is no risk for a post-pandemic near future.

Reference: 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53029854

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52340651

3. https://voxeu.org/article/covid-19-and-macroeconomic-effects-automation

4. Roger Bootle- The AI Economy Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age; Nicholas Brealey Publishing, Sept. 2019

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CoVID-19 and the use of robots - AI Daily