Futurist and professor Paul Saffo thinks
that just as Japan will transition to a robotic society, so too
will the United States and the rest of the world. He predicts the
transition over here will be “more messy” and that a booming
robotic manufacturing industry could potentially devastate the
economy.
“New technology may destroy old jobs, but it also creates more
jobs than it destroys,” explains Saffo in a recent Fora interview (see below), but
“that may not be the case with the world of ubiquitous
manufacturing robots.”
He points out that rapidly advancing robotics are replacing
large manufacturing chunks one industry at a time. “What you see
are industries calving off like icebergs, just a whole industry
drops away, suddenly the human operators disappear,” he says.
(cont.)
Paul Saffo recently gave a talk to the Long Now
Foundation entitled: Paul Saffo recently gave a talk to the
Long
Now Foundation entitled: “Secret’s to effective
forecasting.’ In it, Saffo argued that “inflection points are
tiptoeing past us all the time.” To make his point, he used the
example of how no robotic cars finished the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, but all 23 cars
started and finished the race just a year later. (For readers
interested in a more in-depth look at this exponential-like
progress, I’d recommend this old post).
Saffo went on to advise forecasters to look for things that
don’t fit. Using the earlier example, he noted how at the same time
robotic cars were achieving their extraordinary progress; there was
a massive 108 car pile-up of “human-driven” automobiles on a
highway in California. Saffo’s point was that the two events point
to a possible future scenario whereby robotic-driven cars become
more feasible.
Well, I recently had a similar experience but instead of noting
the progress in robotic cars, I have witnessed a flurry of articles
documenting the amazing amount of progress being made in the field
of surgical robots, and this progress juxtapositions nicely against
the news suggesting that there is a
growing shortage of trained health care professionals to serve
America’s growing geriatric populations. (cont.)
Is IBM gearing up to compete with Wolfram Alpha in the computational search game? Maybe. Is IBM gearing to take on the top minds on popular TV game show Jeopardy? Definitely. Check out this video from Big Blue:
Developments such as this have got me thinking about not just the computational search just over the horizon, but also the rise of qualitative search that futurist Paul Saffo mysteriously alluded to in this MemeBox interview.
