Could Cloud Robotics Threaten Jobs?

Martin Ford, author of Lights in the Tunnel, writing for the Financial Times comments that Google's Cloud Robot Operating System, ROS will eventually lead to technological job loss.

Google announced its new initiative called “cloud robotics” in conjunction with robot manufacturer Willow Garage. Willow Garage and a variety of other contributors have developed an open source (free) operating system for robots, with the unsurprising name “ROS” — or Robot Operating System. ROS is being positioned as the MS-DOS (or MS Windows) of robotics.



Ford writes,

One of the most important cloud-based robotic capabilities is certain to be object recognition. In my book, The Lights in the Tunnel, I have a section where I talk about the difficulty of building a general-purpose housekeeping robot largely because of the object recognition challenge: A housekeeping robot would need to be able to recognize hundreds or even thousands of objects that belong in the average home and know where they belong. In addition, it would need to figure out what to do with an almost infinite variety of new objects that might be brought in from outside.

ROS may be a huge step towards bringing the power of object recognition, not only to robots, but to other devices - and inexpensively. A robot in your home or in a commercial setting could take advantage of a database comprising the visual information entered by tens of millions of mobile device users all over the world. That will go a long way toward ultimately making object recognition and manipulation practical and affordable.

The advantages of cloud robotics, notes Ford are:

• As in the object recognition example, robots will be able to take advantage of a wide range of online data resources.
• Migrating more intelligence into the cloud will make robots more affordable, and it will be possible to upgrade their capability remotely — without any need for expensive hardware modifications. Repair and maintenance might also be significantly easier and largely dealt with remotely.
• It will be possible to train one robot, and then have an unlimited number of other robots instantly acquire that knowledge via the cloud. Machine learning is likely to be highly disruptive to the job market at some point in the future in part because of this ability to rapidly scale what machines learn across entire organizations — potentially threatening huge numbers of jobs.

Ford notes, that this change will not happen overnight, but it is likely to happen, especially if the tasks undertaken currently by people are somewhat routine.  The argument is matched by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book, Race Against the Machine, which indicates that technological job obsolescence is probably already well underway.





Financial Times