Rodney Brooks: Why we will rely on robots

https://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_brooks_why_we_will_rely_on_robots?language=en

Rodney Brooks is a MIT professor, he is a founder of iRobot, a company which produces prevalent autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner. He also published many important robotics papers. In this talk, he explained why we need robots and build our society on the shoulders of robots.

In general, people think robots would take our monotonous jobs and lead to a high unemployment rate in human society. However, Rodney views this issue from a different angle. He believes that people overestimate technology in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term. He gave us some examples, one example is librarian. In this case, people all benefit from collaborating with technology in the short term and failed to foresee the technology trends in the long term.

From his perspective, what we really need to worry about is global demographic trends. Although the world's population is continuing to grow, but the working age populations will soon start a decline. As we are all living longer lives than ever before, we will start to get older and gradually feel the effects on our lives. Especially for many developed countries, where the number of people above retirement age has increased, but there will be less people to take care of them. For elderly people, a companion robot could help to perform tasks like lifting heavy objects, driving cars to visit people, etc... Robots actually give people a chance to have dignity as they get older.

Another major concept proposed by Rodney is that, as we need robots helping humans on daily tasks. We need a great interface with robots, even ordinary people can interact with. We don't need to learn programming in order to tell robots what to do. Rodney then demonstrated how to interact with an assemble line robot called Baxter. This robot can be programmed by factory workers to automate tasks easily.