Not content with shipping millions of American jobs overseas (hello, Mitt Romney!) and stashing tens of billions of dollars out of the IRS' reach (I'm looking at you, Apple, IBM et al), American businesses are apparently determined to rid themselves of the inconvenience of flesh-and-blood workers.
The tech bro geniuses of Silicon Valley are happily on-board and are doing their bit to destroy all low-waged, low-skilled service jobs.
Last week, the tech bros gave us robot burger flippers; this week, it's robot bellhops. Wired Magazine reports:
The robot, to be dubbed the Botlr when it enters service, was created by Silicon Valley robotics company Savioke, and strictly speaking, it can’t hand you a toothbrush. It’s a cylindrical machine on wheels, with a basin and a lid on top. It can hold standard room service items like toiletries, water bottles, and newspapers, and find its own way to hotel rooms. It can even ride the elevator. And beginning Wednesday, it’s making test runs at the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, California.
The Savioke founding team all worked at Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research lab that closed shop last year. Savioke launched in 2013, has funding from Google Ventures, and is focused on making robots responsive enough (and affordable enough) for the service industry. “If you look at robotics, the most widely used robots outside of Roombas, or simple robots, are industrial robots, and there’s about 2 million in use,” says Savioke CEO Steve Cousins. “We wanted to do that outside the assembly space.”
Swell. I was amused by some of the reactions
my last diary on this subject provoked. More than a few people took the attitude that: 'Hey, these jobs are shitty anyway; why not let robots do them? Then people can find
fulfilling work
yadyadyayada..'.
Oh, sure...when some poorly educated, low-skilled worker gets replaced by a robot, they can found a Silicon Valley start-up and become a tech bro zillionaire. Or they can retrain. Except retraining is expensive and time-consuming. But let's say our worker retrains as a programmer. Whoops: those jobs are being outsourced to Vijay and Pandit in Bangalore, who'll do the same job for nickels on the dollar...and so it goes.
I'm guessing the outrage will only begin when robots start to threaten the professional classes with strong guilds: doctors, lawyers etc. Given the amount of data available and the speed of modern processing and comms, how soon before doctors become redundant? It's only a matter of time. Already, robotic diagnostics (blood work and the like) are starting to dominate the field and already, there are software applications for legal work (drawing up a will, etc etc).
The same thing is happening in many other professional fields (software engineering, CAD, network engineering, video editing): name a job...if the insatiably greedy corporate sharks can ship it to someplace else and get it done for peanuts, then consider it gone.
When Google's self-driving cars, linked to the cloud and GPS, make cab-drivers redundant, I guess a lot of people will shrug and point to 'progress'.
Let's see how many people are talking blithely about 'retraining' and 'finding more fulfilling work' when it's their job being phased out by robots. Because a job is only 'vital' if you're doing it, right Doc?