Philosophy, Economics, and Virtue.
“Flourishing manifestly requires external goods in addition, just as we said. For it is impossible or not easy for someone without equipment to do what is virtuous”
Aristotle
“Do Well by Doing Good.”
Benjamin Franklin
Part 1
The Art of Equipage; Economics
Preface -
Let's be honest. Robotics is in its embryonic state. They can walk bipedally although they do fall down. They operate on AI which sometimes hallucinates but that's the leading edge and they know not virtue, the genesis of the art of equipage, economics. This leading edge is the territory of the android robot.
Behind them are very capable warehouse robots like Amazon uses which are not androids but can still empower a human employee. That means that they can dispossess a large number of unneeded human employees.
Also behind them are stationary robotic arms, under development for at least forty years and getting better with every year. Those three elements, warehouse robots, robotic arms, and reliable AI, all on a long march to performance competence, are all that's needed to accomplish a robotics revolution.
Robots may be performance primitives but those characteristics are not written in stone. Robots are a work in progress and in five years or fifteen years will be a force of nature in the workplace but the real disruption comes when robots build and maintain themselves, a significant distance down the road, a point of development I am calling the Economic Singularity.
The Emerging Problem -
The significance of the Economic Singularity is that it marks the theoretical possibility of massive displacement of human beings from the workplace. Current treatments of AI and robotics introduction use creative destruction and the historic model of the deployment of the IBM 360 as a model. This is not necessarily the case. It may be more disruptive than we can imagine.
While we need to prepare for it this will not happen at once but in stages. Stage 1 is what we are in currently, the deployment of individual robots on production lines. We are at the beginning of Stage 2, the deployment of AI directed, by low latency 5G signals, smart components of limited but specific capability in centrally managed hives or systems.
While they can make many products, a hive making and maintaining a robotic arm is doubtful, at this time. As AI computer aided design systems factor in the capabilities that do exist however it will be perfectly possible for such a hive to build and maintain wheeled carriers and robotic arms. It may not look like the movies but it will be scary capable and scary capable of displacing human beings and their wages from aggregate demand. That has the possibility of demand insufficiency built-in.
Spain is working on building such a factory right now using German money from closed coal mines. Nvidia is sponsoring many other such factories and warehouses around the world in various stages of development and design. These developments are happening rapidly and at scale. China has 5G android robots in development, capable of deployment in a hive. All of this is converging on the Economic Singularity with relative rapidity. It will happen.
Comments
Post a Comment