Robotics, the future is now

The idea of robotics and androids has always been prowling in humans mind. We all have seen films and series like Star Wars, Blade Runner, Transformers or I Robot. These films are a very good example of a vision of ourselves coexisting with different types of robots in a future. A future that thanks to the new technological advances seems to be already here.

Nowadays there are lots of things that work differently due to the robotics. We have cars that drive by themselves, cooking robots, homes that heat themselves and close the windows automatically. It is true that these innovations have still to improve and that just a few people can access to them, but we evolve very fast. 10 years ago things like Whats App, Uber or Instagram were nearly unknown or didn’t even exist. That represent a good example of how fast things change today. The future is now.

This innovation environment lead us to some important questions regarding our future expectations:

-To what degree will robotics be parts of the ordinary landscape of the general population by 2025?

-Which parts of life will change the most as these tools advance?

-Which parts of life will remain relatively unchanged?

Although it’s always difficult to predict future issues with precision, there are different experts like Jeff Jarvis, Marc Prensky or David Clark between others, who have elaborate some theories on this issue.

As a general idea, they all state in way or another that robotics will be integrated into nearly every aspect of most people’s daily lives.

Analyzing the different statements of the experts we could say that our next future is going to be very different from now. Artificial intelligence will be built into the algorithmic architecture of countless functions of business and communication, increasing relevance, reducing noise, increasing efficiency, and reducing risk across everything from finding information to making transactions.

Driving, transportation, and logistics will experience dramatic changes. Pizzas will not be delivered by teenagers hoping for a tip. Food will be raised by robotic vehicles, even in small plot urban farms that will become the norm, since so many people will have lost their jobs to ‘bots.

Robotic sex partners will be a commonplace. The penetration of robotics will be close to 100% in many areas and it would depend as it is today on wealth. It’s going to be something similar as the cell phones nowadays, were 2/3 of the total world population use them daily.

These technologies will be integrated so completely as to be nearly invisible to most users most of the time. Computers as we know them today will disappear and the jobs made by what we commonly known as “invisible people” (taxi drivers, garbage collectors, passports controllers…) will be replaced by “invisible robots”.

Intelligent agents will increasingly manage our day-to-day lives and be omnipresent in our homes. This will also affect our educational system of course.

Hal Varian, chief economist for Google, views the current wave of smartphone-enabled assistants as the tip of the iceberg: “We will rely on personal assistance from devices such as Google Now, Siri, Watson, etc. Much of the interaction will be verbal, so this will look a lot like the Star Trek computer interaction. We will expect computers that we meet to know us and our history of interaction with them. In general, they will infer what we want, and our role is simply to refine and verify that expectation. We will be well on our way to universal access to all human knowledge via the worldwide network of mobile devices and data centers. Day-to-day interaction with devices and data will be by voice. One industry that will be hugely affected is education: what should be people be taught when they can access all human knowledge all the time?”

Advances in AI and robotics will be a boon for the elderly, disabled, and sick.

A number of experts surveyed predicted that caring for the sick, elderly, and physically challenged will be revolutionized by advances in robotics.

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said, “I like to consider questions such as this by asking what problem needs a solution. I believe that one reason the ‘smart home’ has not taken off so well is that the dumb house is good enough. I think commuting is a problem (so self-driving cars as well as telework will be popular). We will see robots in health care and care of the elderly. But these may not be humanoid robots, but devices designed to work in specialized spaces designed for them.”

As we can see the insertion of robotics will change almost every aspect of our life.

The passing of time will tell us the final consequences of this revolution.