Robotic technology has improved greatly over the last few decades. Just over the last decade, smartphones have created a bunch of innovation in sensors, mobile processors, batteries, etc. And reduced the cost of those things greatly.
But robots haven't really proliferated outside of narrow applications. The main thing holding them back is they are blind and dumb. They can only do very simple rote tasks over and over again. They can't identify objects in an image. They can't figure out how to pick something up. They can't learn from trial and error.
ML has improved massively over the last few years. It's now possible to do machine vision at (arguably) super-human levels on certain tasks. When you see videos of reinforcement learners learning to play video games; that's not a huge stretch from controlling a robot. There have been similar jumps in ability in many other areas. From machine translation to speech recognition.
Sure, there may be lots of over-inflated expectations. But I think a vast increase in automation is well within the limits of what is possible in the near future. You may not get Jarvis. But we will get robots that can understand simple orders and learn to do simple tasks.
That's huge. That's replacing most human jobs huge. It will completely change our economy and our way of life.
But robots haven't really proliferated outside of narrow applications. The main thing holding them back is they are blind and dumb. They can only do very simple rote tasks over and over again. They can't identify objects in an image. They can't figure out how to pick something up. They can't learn from trial and error.
ML has improved massively over the last few years. It's now possible to do machine vision at (arguably) super-human levels on certain tasks. When you see videos of reinforcement learners learning to play video games; that's not a huge stretch from controlling a robot. There have been similar jumps in ability in many other areas. From machine translation to speech recognition.
Sure, there may be lots of over-inflated expectations. But I think a vast increase in automation is well within the limits of what is possible in the near future. You may not get Jarvis. But we will get robots that can understand simple orders and learn to do simple tasks.
That's huge. That's replacing most human jobs huge. It will completely change our economy and our way of life.