Economics of the Robotic Revolution

Today, I was thinking about robots like I often do, and I wondered how much an individual robot would have to be in order to be economically competitive with a human being. Basically,  such a robot is cheaper than hiring a living human, then it is more advantageous for a business to buy a robot than hire a person.

A good comparison I’ve found is comparing a robot to a car. Both are highly complex machines that perform important tasks for people. In fact, in a very real sense, comparing a robot to a human is much like comparing a car to its predecessor: the horse.

Cars have many advantages over horses: they are faster, more powerful. They are cheaper and easier to buy and maintain (yes, even with $3 a gallon gas).  Cars don’t die of starvation if you ignore them for a couple weeks. Cars shield you from the elements when traveling and come with air conditioning and handy cup holders…the list can go on and on. Horses used to be the common method of getting around, but now are something of an extravagance simply because something objectively better has come along.

Robots have many of the same advantages over humans as cars do over horses. Also, in terms of economics, let’s make a few assumptions. Let’s assume that a company that buys a robot keeps that robot and uses it for labor every day for 10 years. Cars regularly last 10 years or more. Let’s also assume that the robot works an average of eighteen hours a day, using the other six to recharge, repair, and generally undergo maintenance. If the company was employing a human, how much does that much manpower cost?

The answer is quite surprising. There are roughly 3,650 days in 10 years. Times 18 hours per day, means that a company would get 65,700 man-hours of labor out of one robot. The current minimum wage in the US is $7.25, so that many man-hours of labor costs $476,325. That’s almost half a million dollars. For one robot.

Now there are also issues like the cost to power and repair those robots, but again, how much does it cost to keep a car repaired and fueled? A few hundred dollars a month? Assume $500. For 10 years that works out to only $60,000.  Still, a $400,000 robot is economically competitive. Wow. Factoring in inflation that will likely happen over the next 25 years (at which point computer power becomes high enough due to Moore’s Law), an economically competitive robot will be in the $1 million range.

Today, you can buy one human brain’s worth of processing power for much less than that. Today’s supercomputers already are smarter than humans, at least in terms of computational power. Of course, as soon as a robot that costs $400,000 hits the market it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will be fired and replaced by robots. Likely, the cost will have to come down to the point where the advantage becomes very obvious.

More Robots

The other day on my break between classes, I decided to get lunch at one of my favorite fast-food restaurants, Jack in the Box. Inside, to my surprise, I found an ordering kiosk all set up and ready to take orders. I’ve read of these, but hadn’t yet encountered one myself.

Of course, I had to use it. And I found it was pretty simple: just follow the instructions on screen. And my food was ready just as fast as it I had went to a person. I used my debit card but the machine could also take cash and dispense change.

This machine is just one highlight of the incoming robotic revolution. It does a job that supplants a human worker (in this case the cashier). But this particular type of machine does have its flaws. For one, the interface is through touchscreen. People are used to interacting via speech, and prefer to do it that way. For a kiosk like this to really take off, it would need to be able to understand and respond entirely through voice commands. Watching the other people in the restaurant order, all of them preferred to go up to the person behind the counter. One did try the kiosk, but decided to go with the person when the opportunity presented itself.

We are just beginning to see the widespread application of voice-command technology. It has a high computational demand, and is still seen as something of a novelty. But so did the PC, the ATM machine, and the telephone. Once people get over the initial unease, they often quickly realize the potential and embrace new technologies (much more so for younger generations). Coupled with the fact that voice-command technology will very likely get cheaper and higher quality due to Moore’s Law, by 2020 interacting with multiple machines and kiosks solely through voice probably won’t seem strange at all.

Once that happens, we’ll be one giant step closer to the robotic revolution.

Tastes Of Chicken!

The other day I was idly thinking about the ethics of cloned meat. From a biological perspective, it’s exactly the same stuff, it’s just made in a different way. Often, this way is much more efficient than raising animals, and there’s bonus that cloned meat was never actually part of a living animal, and so was never really “killed” to feed us. From both an ethical and practical standpoint, cloned meat seems the way to go. 

I myself love eating meat, but have always been sort of bothered by the fact that it was once an animal. I mean, I know the animal kingdom is a harsh place where animals compete and eat one another, and that we, arguably, are just competing better. So it hasn’t really stopped me from eating it.

But then I started extending the argument, as I always do, to its logical extreme. If it’s ok to clone beef, pork, chicken, etc., what about animals that we don’t normally eat due to practical or cultural values. For example, is it wrong to eat a cloned horse steak? It was never actually part of a real living horse. A horse didn’t have to die to provide you with the steak, just donate  a small sample of its DNA. Or how about cloning dog or cat or dolphin? Or, what about cloning endangered animal meat.

Or, taking it to the logical conclusion, what if we cloned human meat? Again, a cloned human steak was never part of a person. I don’t know if I’d want to eat human, but I might try just to see. You never know, it might be really good.

Even more bizarre (if you can imagine that), what if you cloned your own meat? You could have a slice of you. I don’t know. I don’t imagine that many people would want to eat human meat, but there probably is at least a small market out there. Maybe that’s one future industry that will develop.

The Robotic Revolution Is Happening Already

Today I read an article about how the United States Post Office may close up to 1,000 of its offices, putting thousands of its employees out of work. It’s quite interesting that the primary cause of this is, unsurprisingly, the Internet:

The local post office long has been the center of many American communities, but with people turning increasingly to the Internet to send messages and pay bills, financial losses are forcing the Postal Service to consider consolidating or closing hundreds of local facilities. [emphasis mine]

This is directly what will happen in the next few decades for nearly every business. Automation doesn’t necessary entail humanoid robots (though that will be a large segment of it), it could be something as simple as a piece of software. The automated ordering system I suggested to my company  is just that: a piece of software that does the job of hundreds of human workers at a tiny fraction of the cost while doing a far better job than any human can possibly do.

Of course, there’s still need for postal employees currently because there still are pieces of mail which have to be hand delivered (like packages). I myself am currently expecting a couple of packages (though thinking about it, everything I am expecting is a form of digital media, and could theoretically just be streamed over the Internet. In the next ten to twenty years, physical media like CDs and DVDs will likely completely vanish and we’ll be able to stream whatever we want instantly.)

Of course, what are the employees laid off going to do? They may be able to get jobs elsewhere, eventually, but where. You see the thing that took their jobs (the Internet), doesn’t require as many people to operate. When you send an email, the delivery is handled completely autonomously. When you send a letter, a number of people have to sort it, deliver it, sort it again, etc. The only need for people when dealing with the Internet, is for maintenance, troubleshooting, and designing new sites.

And, of course, you might think, “we’ll customers prefer interacting with people than machines.” but that isn’t what we’re seeing. If it was, this wouldn’t be happening. Eventually, machines will be able to do all jobs, and do them much better than flesh-and-blood people.

Some Thoughts on Building a Dyson Sphere

A Dyson Sphere is a massive solar power collector that entirely encloses. I used the concept in my series Alien Civilizations as a means to capture all the outpouring energy from all the stars in the universe.

The concept I used is likely the most feasible: a swarm of independently orbiting collectors, each with its own orbit, all controlled by computer system to keep them from crashing into each other. This doesn’t require any undiscovered materials or technology, and we could probably begin building such a structure today. The only problem is the sheer amount of mass that would have to be transformed and transported, required enormous space-based infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities.

But there’s another design that is far less feasible, but more interesting: a single solid shell, 2 AU in diameter, used as a huge space habitat. This has a number of problems, not the least of which is that it is unstable.

Newton’s Shell Theorem states that in any hollow uniform sphere, the net gravitational force in any location is zero. Simply put, if you were inside a hollow sphere, you would not “fall” in any particular direction due to gravity. At all points, the gravitational force from all parts of sphere cancel each other out. The problem is: how you keep such a thing centered on the Sun?

One obvious answer is attitude thrusters, but that seems a bit drastic, and energy intensive. My idea is, well, what if it isn’t a uniform sphere? What if we specifically constructed the Dyson Sphere so that it was more massive on one side? Could we set up some sort of psuedo-orbital situation from that?

Second is how you go about constructing it. Half a sphere is also very unstable, but is an inevitable stage in construction. Or it is? Instead, what if we were to first build the equator-region in inertial orbit? What if we start by building a giant ring that it orbiting the Sun? Then, we start building towards the poles, keeping the center of mass within the equatorial plane at all times?

Last is the fact that the Dyson Sphere will heat up. Now because the Dyson Sphere is so huge, it actually won’t get as hot as the Sun. In fact, we can calculate where, at thermal equilibrium, the Dyson Sphere will be a comfortable 72 degrees F. In order for it to be that way, a Dyson Sphere should be around 265 million km in radius, or about 1.77 AUs. This is quite a bit larger than the orbit of Earth, but that it because all parts of the Sphere are in full daylight constantly, whereas half the Earth is always in shadow. Also, the spherical shape of the Earth spreads out the incoming heat from the Sun onto a larger area (specifically twice as large).

Of course, the main challenge is finding a material that could withstand such enormous structural stresses, and finding enough matter to actually build it. For those, I have no idea. The amount of usable material in the solar system is probably not enough.

Well, but if we do overcome those obstacles, maybe we could build one. It would certainly be a sight to see. Or not. Considering the sphere would completely cover the Sun, it would only appear as a giant black disk from outside. How boring.

Automating My Job

Many times at work, I wonder about the future of my job, about how it will eventually be taken over by robotic labor. It may be strange that I think about how to eliminate my own livelihood, but it still fascinates me. I am a checker at a grocery store. My duties are to check out groceries, collect money, stock the deli case (dairy, cold juices, butter, cheese, etc), and ice cream when I close. These are deceptively simple tasks since we would generally expect anyone to be able to do them. But automating my job means overcoming some of the toughest obstacles in robotics

For one, I have to able to interact with and help customers. That’s no easy task for a machine. I require a mastery of the English language with very minimal margin for error when doing this. We have voice-command systems today, but these are fairly limited (for example, when checking various features on my cell phone’s plan, I can solely use my voice, but maneuvering through menus essentially consists of the system telling me “to do X say Y”. If I stray from that, it easy gets confused. Fortunately, it’s good enough that I never had to go through a tutorial or anything to “train” it to recognize what I’m saying). In order to interact with customers, a computer

I also have to walk around the store, maneuvering among other customers and employees, which, of course, requires accurate vision processing, balance, and mobility. In addition, when ringing up groceries, I have to be able to recognize the many different types of produce. When buying groceries, you may have noticed funny little stickers that have numbers on them. These are called Produce Look-Up codes, which checkers punch into the check-stand to correctly charge the customer. One thing you may notice is that many types have no sticker at all. We checkers have to memorize the rest. It’s easy to teach a computer what PLU# goes to which type, the hard part is getting it to visually recognize what the produce in question actually is, preferable without having to stop every time to ask the customer what it is.

Bagging groceries is also no simple task. You have to be able to recognize which items should go on top, which should go on the bottom, that only meat should be bagged together, only cold items together, etc. It might be useful to be able to feel temperature by touching it. That way, only cold items go in one back, hot items go in another, and so on.

All these things require a formidable computational capacity to achieve. Not only that, we also have to be able cram all that capacity into approximately the volume of a toaster. I mean, modern-day supercomputers already approach the capacity of the human brain. They, in theory, could be used to drive a bipedal humanoid robot that could directly replace a human being, but that robot would be horrendously expensive and impractical. Plus the computer system running it would struggle to fit in a semi-truck, not to mention a humanoid frame.

But, we only need to look to Moore’s Law to see that the main requirement (a massively powerful computer system), is rapidly become cheaper and cheaper. Within 15 to 20 years, the average desktop computer will exceed the intelligence of its human operator. About ten years after that, the required programming to create multi-tasking humanoid and non-humanoid machines will be commonplace. 

I’m not worried, though. I highly doubt I’ll still be a checker in 2030. Maybe, if I choose to stay with the company, I’ll be a store manager or even executive. My children, however, looking for their first job, won’t be so lucky…

Yes, I’m Posting Something About the Swine Flu Too

As you’ve no doubt heard, there’s a new epidemic spreading throughout the world called Swine Flu. To be honest, I’m not too worried about this becoming something on the scale of the 1918 flu epidemic. We know about viral vectors, have the ability to be able to effectively quarantine affected areas, and can develop vaccines that will protect people (who are smart enough to actually get themselves inoculated) from sickness.

Not that we should become complaicent. It’s like when you see a cop while driving. You slow down, sit up straight, put down the cell phone, etc. If we all are just a little more conscious about washing our hands regularly and not coughing and sneezing all over the place, it will make swine flu spread much more slowly and perhaps cause it to run itself out.

Of course, looking at all this from a futurists’ perspective, it all seems a bit silly. An uploaded person is obviously completely immune to a biological virus. In fact, it’s a pretty good argument for why someone should get uploaded. Any and all ways you can get sick and die from being biological (flu, cancer, heart failure, stroke, etc.) become irrelevant (computer viruses are a different issue, but I think they’ll also not be much threat to an uploading brain mostly because the brain is not a binary computer blindly executing instructions, and neither will an uploaded brain be).

If Ever There Was A Poster Child…

…Steven Hawking would be it. As you, my dear readers, may have heard, Steven Hawking isill. At age 21, he diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), which over the years has completely paralysed his body, save for a few fingers. Also, for the past few weeks, he has also had to be hospitalized for a chest infection that has hospitalized him.

I don’t wish to sound like I’m parading someone else’s tragedy for my own purposes, but Professor Hawkings’ case is a perfect example of why we need mind uploading. His brain is completely unaffected by his condition, and he has managed to make some of the most important scientific insights in human history. But he has done so against incredible odds. When first diagnosed, his doctors gave him 2-3 years, tops. So far, he has lived 46 years. Partially because of sheer will, but also simply because he has been exceptionally lucky.

If we did have mind uploading, Hawking would have the option to leave his body permanently, and become able-bodied again. He would be able to go on and make even more incredible scientific discoveries, perhaps even uncovering the “theory of everything”, the ultimate physical law of the universe. But as it is, he’s trapped. His body is killing him, and unfortunately there’s nothing he can do.

Alien Civilizations VI: Additional Thought

Thinking over my hypothesis about why there are no extraterrestrial civilizations around, at least none within several hundred million light-years, I realized a small loophole. I assumed that the alien civilization would be trying to survive as long as possible. But what if there isn’t that much longer to live? That is, what if the universe won’t be capable of supporting life or intelligence of any kind at some point in the future?

It may sound strange but there is a hypothesis being kicked around called the Big Rip. Basically, the universe is expanding, and it is accelerating. So, what if the acceleration itself is increasing as well? In technical kinematic terms, the jerk is non-zero (yes, that really is the term for change of acceleration. Change in position is velocity. Change in velocity is acceleration. Change in acceleration is called jerk. I didn’t just make that up. Jerk). Anyway, it postulates that if this is the case eventually galaxies and solar systems, all the way down to planets, life-forms, even atoms will get ripped apart by the rushing expansion of space. If true, the scientists that developed this concept estimate that around 50 billion years from now this would happen.

50 billion years is a long time, but is actually quite small compared to the length of time I estimated an advanced civilization could survive. In short, there may be alien civilizations out there that don’t convert the entire universe into energy stores because they just don’t need to. A single star would supply all their energy needs until the end. They might even encourage the development of other intelligent species since, hey, we’re all doomed anyway, and there’s more than enough room in the meantime. They might as well have some company.

The Big Rip is still just a hypothesis. There’s no evidence that it’s actually going to happen. But if we do ever discover alien civilizations, it might be a big tip-off that maybe the universe doesn’t have as long to go as we think it does (though it would do to confirm it independently, as they probably would have).

The Future of Broadcasting

I’ve recently been turned onto Hulu, a site which shows TV programs for free, paid for with commercials, much like ordinary TV. To be honest, I think the format shows promise. You can watch any show you want at any time and there’s fewer commercials (probably because Hulu has lower operating costs).

But, I have noticed a few problems with the format and construction which may make it an impediment to going mainstream. If I were making an online network, this is what I would do:

1. Make it so it’s possible to watch on an ordinary TV.- Obviously, since Hulu is online you have to watch it on a computer. But watching TV shows and movies on a computer is uncomfortable. The screen is small, resolution is usually poorer than television, and the vast majority of people have their living rooms centered around the television, since it’s been around for the past fifty or sixty years. I’ve always said (though maybe not on this blog or The Other Blog, I can’t be sure), any new technology has to relatively easily fit into the existing infrastructure of the end user. Otherwise it’s just too much of a strain and the technology dies, or is at least relegated to obscurity.

One way to accomplish this is to basically have something like a cable or satellite box. Hey, maybe you could have an existing cable or satellite provider carry it. Or perhaps launch your own provider (though that again tends to run a bit contrary to, let’s call it the the Existing Infrastructure Law, or EIL).

2. Offer Original Programming.- Hulu does put some originally programming on, but it’s not much. To really be competitive, they should commission their own programs, again, much like television networks do.

3. Keep It Free.- Hulu is of course, free, and so is broadcast television (discounting cable and satellite fees if you have those, which, most people do), paid for by advertising. It’s a business model that’s worked very well for them, and radio and newspapers, magazines, etc. (though those last two have a small price attached, most of their revenue is from advertising).

4. Offer Web 2.0 Compatibility.- User-content created websites like YouTube, Wikipedia, WordPress (hey! nice self-reference!), etc. have exploded in popularity over the past few years. Believe it or not, Youtube is only 4 years old. Wikipedia is 8 years old, and has seen its content double roughly every year (though this has slowed in recent years). Having the ability to load and view your own and others pictures and videos easily would be a popular feature on the TV-based medium.

I think that a network with those features would be quite competitive with both existing networks and internet sites. It’s sort of a fusion of all the best qualities of TV and internet and we will likely see something very similar in the coming decade or two.