The Development of Robots and Their Impact on The Economy

The technology industry is rapidly evolving with new products and new features being released constantly. Nineteenth-century is marked as the acceleration and wide adoption of industrial processes. According to the Oxford dictionary, a robot is a machine that can perform a complicated series of tasks automatically.

The beginning

In the early nineteenth century, there were almost no telephones and computers were almost unheard from one hundred years ago from today, but now it is universal. We are now at the cusp of a new technological shift of equal significance: the Robotics Revolution. One of the first robotic devices to be considered and used in day-to-day life was the use of Egyptian water clock. The water clock measured time as a result of the force of water falling through it at a constant speed/rate. After the clock, in the early fourteenth century, Leonardo Da Vinci designed a mechanical man that looked like an armoured knight. It was designed in a way that, the mechanism inside the knight moved as though there was a real person inside. Apart from these inventions, the first-ever modern robot was created by Friedrich Kauffman, in 1810, a soldier with automatic bellows. It was a device with an airbag that emits a stream of air when squeezed together with two handles, used for blowing air into a fire.

Further Technological Advancements

In the 1940s, after the arrival of programmable computers, the first real robots has commenced. From the past, the most known robot is the one we know as today, created by George Devol in 1950s, called Unimate. But due to lack of teething problems, it did not get so popular. This robot was later bought by Joseph Engleberger and modified into an industrial robot, and was sold under the label ‘Unimation’. This robot was capable of performing dangerous and repetitive tasks, and the success of his efforts entitled him to be the ‘Father of Robotics’. The creation of a fully autonomous robot took place in the twentieth century. Hence after the invention of Unimate, the advancements in artificial intelligence continued and soon inventors started making robots more human-like. Lately, features like autonomous thinking, artificial skin tissues, emotions and self-awareness are being incorporated in robots.

The world has been lifted by the new concept of robotics, but the impacts of robots have both positive and negative impacts on the various sectors of the economy and towards people in general. These changes are interesting and at the same time, it is exciting for innovative companies behind today’s latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Computers, software and algorithms have been proven to simplify our daily tasks and makes it impossible to imagine how our lives can be managed without them. But on the other hand, it is also impossible to imagine how the process steps will be managed without a human touch. The information economy characterised by exponential growth replaces the mass production industry based on the economy of scales  Robots are being used in a lot of branches in our life, for instance, medical field, transportation, cooking, education etc.

Using robots and their impacts on the economy

Since everyone is thrilled to have robots in future, we have actually accepted that machines can be trusted to do things for us. According to new research, almost two thirds (60%) of British people believe there will be a robot in every home within the next 50 years and only a quarter of them can't imagine a life where a robot wouldn't be part of their family. Not every occupation is going to be replaced by robots, but it is very certain that a few of the occupational activities will be performed by machines. For instance, there is 87 per cent risk of a barkeeper to be replaced by robots. Presently, it is technically feasible for a robot to mix drinks, taking client orders, receiving payments and receiving complaints. A large number of small and medium-sized companies, in particular, are likely to hold against technical devices due to the high acquisition costs and lack of qualified personnel. A study shows that 12 per cent of total US and German employment will be at a high risk of being replaced by machines, whereas other studies have come to conclusion that artificial intelligence and robots not just causes loss of jobs but the automation process will create about 390,000 new jobs in the third sector by the next ten years in Germany. For instance, one of the most recently created job is a data scientist and comprehensive IT knowledge is vital for this complex job.

Autonomous robots save workers from carrying out dangerous tasks and they can also work in hazard conditions. The ramification of robots and machines taking over is undeniable. Robots are helping humans by taking over dangerous jobs and one of the significant examples of this is robotic welding. Manual welding is difficult and dangerous for the human body as it requires intense hit and produces and a lot of noise, causing other health effects. Robots are also used by oil companies to inspect their pipeline which is a dangerous task for human beings, as the pipe full of gas and toxic materials can cause death.

The first robot called Puma350 was used in the medical field for surgery in 1985. The purpose of this was to orient a needle for a brain biopsy under computerized tomography guidance. It was discontinued later due to safety issues. Engineers recently have discovered surgical robots and this has successfully attracted huge financial investments on autonomous robots in the medical field. The introduction of nanotechnology in medicine is considered a game-changer. Since robots are established in clinics all around the world, engineers are working on successfully inventing micro and nanorobots, since they have the potential to do things that required accurate and precise performance that human beings lack. Robots are considered as General Purpose Technology, which means that robots have the potential to alter societies by their impact on economics and social structures and hence, robots are used in education as well. The advancement in science and technology has made it possible to learn something from a distant place i.e. telepresence robots does the work for teachers. Despite the benefits of robots in education, it is difficult to expect a robot to adapt to human behaviour and their feelings to display emotions and expressions. This autonomous behaviour will need great amount of research and development in robotics.

Other than the job factor, the gap between the rich and poor will increase dramatically which will, in turn, lead to social unrest that will be dangerous for the growth of the economy. For instance, the agricultural sector has already been a part of this change and will only increase in the future. The use of transporting machines, automatic irrigation systems and intelligent harvesting has decreased the demand for foreign harvest hands and helpers. This trend is seen in high labour cost countries and is increasing even more, which will cause their dependence on cheaper workers to decline and result in an oversupply of cheap workers in the relevant low labour cost countries. For instance, research made on children to study the interaction and efficiency of robots in education provided with a conclusion that, children wanted them to understand emotions and expressions because the robots sounded unnatural and did not adapt to situations by changing tone or pitch.

Amazon has given a start to the use of robots for their customer service for richer experience. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the futuristic drone that is designed to fly packages ordered online to the customers to their doorstep in about 30 minutes. Even if this is beneficial, there are some major roadblocks to why amazon hasn’t been fully relying on drones to deliver packages. One of the major concern with this is that a lot of people find it to be a form of trespassing their private property.

Domestic security robot products are a new addition to the technological advancement and artificial intelligence. The benefits of purchasing security robots or home robots are their ability of multitasking. Multiple companies are now focusing on creating a robot that can do multiple functions with detailed attention and minimum surveillance. These robots are helpful in making life increasingly effortless for families and also is beneficial to the handicaps. But the question of their security still remains, i.e. human fear when it comes to privacy that can arise from hacking issues. Robots have limited capabilities when it comes to preventing crime or form other dangerous situation. It is quite unimaginable to expect a robot to react to situations as humans do as they don’t work with common sense and the intensity to think and react like them. For instance, the worker who was killed by a robot accidentally in the Volkswagen plant. The news stated that the 22-year-old worker was grabbed by the robot and crushed against a metal plate. Media reports of the accident said the man was 'killed by a robot', although a spokesman for the automaker said it was more likely that human error was to blame. He said the robot normally operated within a confined area at the plant, grabbing auto parts and manipulating them. The question here is who to blame for this accident that took place? The answer to this question can be proved by the study done by DeepMind, that is a London based artificial intelligence company. Robots are used to self-learning, i.e. huge amount of data is fed to AI and it eventually begins to discern patterns all by itself. Their study started with the data activity on the screen, that is blocky pixels representing the bricks, the ball and player’s paddle. It is built with layered algorithms and it was not programmed with any knowledge about the activity or its rules and goals and it was left to examine the results. Artificial intelligence failed during the first few games, but it had begun to accurately begin bonding the ball after studying the patterns and by the six hundredth game, the neural was using more expert move attained by observation. Humans are not just pattern recognizers, but robots are, i.e. humans can engage in making logical interfaces and reasoning about everything around us. Human has a store of common-sense knowledge that helps them to figure out situations, all AI could do was to follow the pattern. Recently, Microsoft has invested about 1 billion dollars in on Elon Musk’s plan of replicating the human brain with artificial intelligence.

Conclusion

As discussed throughout the paper on the advantages and disadvantages of having autonomous robots all around us, replacing employees with robots is an inevitable choice for organisations in the service sector as well as the health sector because of the challenging and sometimes unhealthy working environments. Researchers suggest that it should be done in a manner that benefits in improving the employment and motivation of employees in these sectors. In the future, the use of automation will get obvious and spread worldwide, hence the installation of autonomous robots will gain momentum and play major role in all sectors of the economy. Even though robots can do a majority of the work on a better, cheaper and faster way than humans, proper precautions need to be taken. There should be proper training and development in employees or perhaps human in general to meet the future challenges posed by the introduction of advancements in technology and robotics. The impacts of robotics on human have also been discussed in this paper, and yet the true extent of this impact is something that is quite unpredictable.