TechMasters: Tech Experts See Good and Bad Sides of Robots

Will robots ease our toil or become a tool for automation and oppression? People who care about technology seem sharply divided, and passionate, about the topic.

The Pew Research Center asked 1,900 technology experts if robots will help or hurt the workforce over the next 10 years. Nearly half (48%) envision a future in which robots displace significant numbers of workers. The remaining 52% say automation will not displace more jobs than it creates by 2025.

But the numbers were just the starting point for some heated opinions.

“We, as a society, have a lot of decisions to make,” said study co-author Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet Project. “There’s going to be a lot of debate.”

The importance for public policy and education to prepare for a more mechanized future was a key theme in the responses.

“Over the last several years I have found it very curious that article after article on robotics and self-driving cars have skipped over the huge impact all of this will have on jobs,” said Garland McCoy, president and founder of the Technology Education Institute think tank. “The wave after wave of disruptive technology coming from the West Coast is crashing headlong into the policies, lobbyist and special interest of the East Coast.”

Robotics will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for industries such as health care, transportation, and manufacturing, most respondents wrote. They also agree that education is not preparing future workers for this new world.

The optimists cited a few broad themes, saying that historically technology has been a net creator of jobs, new types of work will emerge, technology will free us from drudgery, and we will have the power to choose how we apply robotics to the labor force. Pew identified J.P. Rangaswami, chief scientist for Salesforce.com CRM +0.04%, as representative of the respondents who see robots helping man.

“Driven by revolutions in education and in technology, the very nature of work will have changed radically,” he said.

The pessimists were concerned that the coming wave of innovation will threaten all aspects of the work force, that far more workers will be displaced, and that political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle the hard choices presented by robots. One tech leader cited a Harry Potter villain as representing the fearsome future of technology in the workplace.

“Automation is Voldemort: the terrifying force nobody is willing to name,” said Jerry Michalski, founder of the think tank REX, which focuses on the future. “We hardly dwell on the fact that someone trying to pick a career path that is not likely to be automated will have a very hard time making that choice.”

A key topic laying out this debate between the positive and negative effects of automation was the impact of driverless vehicles.

Some said truck drivers and taxi drivers will lose their jobs and the auto industry will be hurt. Others, like Silicon Valley veteran educator and writer Howard Rheingold, welcome that change.

“I, for one, welcome our self-driving automobile overlords,” Rheingold wrote. “How could they possibly do a worse job than the selfish, drugged, drunk, and distracted humans who have turned our roads into bloodbaths for decades?”

In a section titled “Out of the box responses,” Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, imagined a future where human interaction is an expensive luxury: “Live, human salespeople, nurses, doctors, actors will be symbols of luxury, the silk of human interaction as opposed to the polyester of simulated human contact.”

And Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), pointed to the likelihood of RoboCop-like policemen on city streets. ”They will likely have both infrared detection as well as the ability to see through solid materials and detect heat signatures,” he said. “Several incidents of attacks on robots will be reported.”

The expert predictions came in response to questions asked by the Pew Research Center Internet Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center in an online canvassing conducted between November 25, 2013, and January 13, 2014. Pew invited more than 12,000 experts and members of the interested public to share their opinions.

original post found here=http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/06/tech-experts-see-good-and-bad-sides-of-robots/