Google, Foxconn team to build ROBOT ARMY Contract manufacturer and long time Apple-assembler-extraordinaire Foxconn is now helping Google achieve its ambitious plans in the robotics space, according to the Wall Street Journal. The two firms have apparently been working on something since last year. People familiar with the matter told the paper that Google’s new …
If their dream comes true and robots become widespread replacing humans in most jobs I wonder how long it will take them to realise why profits have dropped sharply.
Yes they will need mechanics and designers to keep them running and develop them further but a few high skilled jobs won't support an entire economy, we're sort of seeing what's to come in the UK and US, what with outsourcing, off-shoring and on-shoring replacing many local jobs meaning high unemployment, high benefit bills, and an economy propped up by Government's creating more and more debt.
When eventually even the offshore workers are out of work things will be bleak.
As Henry Ford once deduced, if you pay your workers well they will buy your products!, can't see robots being big consumers.
can't see robots being big consumers
You give one to every human, and get yourself an in house spy in every home, so you can really accurately target your advertising. We've all seen the films, we know the plot.
When are Google going to start development of V.I.K.I, or is that what they were trying to tell us they'd achieved when they were telling us about how one of the projects had started to associate objects in pictures with the objects uses?
You give one to every human, and get yourself an in house spy in every home, so you can really accurately target your advertising. We've all seen the films, we know the plot.
I think you're missing the point. If the work is being done by the robots, where are the humans going to get the money to pay for the products? Or do we all get given a robot so we can send it out to work to earn us money?
On the eighth day a machine just got upset...
In theory, you are correct, but have you heard of the the 2006 Citi Group Plutonomy report? (google it, but it will be hard to find)
Basically, the report said that large corporations no longer need the end consumer and given the current evidence of this last "Great" recession, it appears to be correct.
While unemployment is slowing falling, wages have still not kept up with the last 30 years of inflation, yet just 2 years after the start of the recession, corporate profits were at record levels. That's right, new records of profits.
Where is that money coming from?
Ultimately, things will get worse for the avg person before they get better. But then again, Marie Antoinette didn't understand this either.
Another bit of trivia: the wage/income gap in the US is worse than the Medieval period. It appears we are once again back to feudalism, corporate style.
(2006 Citi Group Plutonomy) An interesting set of documents but ultimately a way to tell rich people it's ok to be rich, and that in fact they are the important drivers of the economy, and by the way BUY EQUITIES and invest in luxury products, I've worked in banks before and this is pretty typical of the stuff personal wealth management departments churn out.
The problem with the economies mentioned (UK and US predominantly) is that their governments are pretty much controlled by the wealthy and large corporates who share a "screw you jack I'm rich and to hell with everyone else" ethos, they dismiss some of the more egalitarian Northern European economies without mentioning that they are far more stable than the go getting fans of globalsation and exploiting the workers, and also have far less debt.
It will change eventually, already we have some of the wealthy comparing themselves to the Jews in the holocaust, no it's just the social unacceptability of their huge increase in wealth being noticed, there will always be more poor than fabulously wealthy and their existence depends on the masses not noticing too much, exceed it and even if the result isn't violent revolution the huddled masses do have the vote and new parties can arise to upset the applecart.
This is the conversation I just had over coffee this morning:
Daddy, will my robot put me to bed at night?
Probably,
Why don't we just not invite them in?
We will have no choice, there are too many willing fools in the world, like computers and smartphones they will be in every part of your life. Get used to them.
Will it do my homework?
Learn where the off button is honey, daddy will teach you where the off button is.
http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/thumb/e/ef/U-87-Cyber-Combat-Unit.jpg/640px-U-87-Cyber-Combat-Unit.jpg
Just saying. Didn't Graystone start out as a network communications company that then developed a glasses/visor type VR device and then moved into robotics?
What we tend to forget is the amount of, say, plumbers needed to fix piping, washing machines, boilers, etc. when they go wrong. The same principle applies to all technology - and the more sophisticated the technology, the less stable it is, needing more people to tend to it. By and large, this also leaves the detritus of legacy development too - whether it's code included to operate like long-dead operating systems or multiple ways of collecting data that is never used (timesheets are a case in point: I've worked in places where three different methods of accounting for people's time were used, but actually minimal attention was paid to the latest one and none to the others).
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