Food for Thought: I, Robot Baxter

To begin with, it is worth noting that, contrary to common belief, I am not a machine; I simply write an article per day because I enjoy doing it.

When I was little, I used to watch this cartoon called ‘The Jetsons’- it was about the life of a middle- class family living in 2030. I was, at the time, pretty amazed with the cartoon as people in it travelled around in air- bound cars and their houses were build so high above the ground that, come to think of it now, they never showed what they were built ON.

Another amazing feat of the cartoon was that, in its two- hundred odd episodes, the characters did not age a bit; that, I found rather disturbing even when I was little. I decided, however, that being young all the time was a thing of the future.

Leaving the above aside, however, I was mostly amazed by the fact that the protagonist’s secretary (and a lot of his co- workers) were robots (androids, to be politically correct) that seemed to be able to express feelings whilst also being good at their job.

On top of that, in one episode, the robots went on a strike to demand equal pay and breaks because they deemed it unfair that human workers should be allowed more benefits than them.

A ten- year old child should have found the above quiet amusing and somewhat interesting; I didn't.

In fact, the whole concept freaked me out to an unbelievable extent. I succinctly remember the day in which I said that I would never watch that cartoon again; it was an episode in which a baby was delivered by two robots who were not very compassionate with the woman, I thought.

Since that day, I have, quite often, been wondering whether it will, one day, be possible for robots to do those tasks and work alongside humans.

Having gone through the Industrial Revolution, of course, we are now used to factory robots (or machines as we call them) who do most of the assembly. In fact, about 80% of the work in the car industry is done by industrial robots.

Those, however, are quite distant from what I saw on that cartoon as they are, in most cases, kept away from humans, locked up in cages and operating on a 24/7 basis, doing the exact same process with immaculate precision over and over again.

A serious question arises: in today’s economic downturn and high unemployment, will it be beneficial to have even more robots that will, naturally, replace even more people and make more jobs redundant?

Such a move will surely increase productivity and decrease costs rather dramatically but what of the humans; what of us?

Some argue that such people will be able to find more creative jobs whilst leaving the mundane jobs to the robots; what those people fail to take into account, however, it that we currently live in a time where most people would much rather feed and provide for their family than go on searching for a ‘creative job’.

After all, if people could find more creative jobs, where on Earth is this high unemployment rate coming from...?

There is, however, no place for speculation because such a robot does not yet exist.

It will, indeed, take some time for us to invent a robot who can use common sense and can work among humans because of its small size and safety.

Also, even if such a robot was to be constructed, it would most probably be quite pricy and not readily available to everyone.

I guess we shall have to wait.

As you might probably imagine, I am only joking; meet Baxter:

I shall not bother with providing you with a review of Baxter as there are millions of those on the internet.

I shall, however, note a couple of very important traits of his (that’s right, ‘HIS’ and not ‘ITS’...)

• It costs $ 22,000. Quite affordable, eh? Also, it is now commercially available.
• It applies COMMON SENSE so that, for instance, if a conveyor belt malfunctions, it will take that into account and pause until it gets fixed.
• It LEARNS very very fast. All you need to do is grab its hands and show him how to do what you want him to do once. He then nods to let you know that he has understood you.
• It takes AN HOUR to set up; no expertise required.
• It weights 150 lbs (75kg). It can, thus, work alongside humans; bumping into it won’t give you a massive bump on the head.

So that’s that; we now have a robot who can help us out in our daily tasks at work whilst working alongside us.

The good news is that I am no longer freaked out because I am not ten; on the other hand, I can’t quite decide whether introducing such a robot in the workplace is a good or a bad move.

I shall let you decide.