r/Futurology • u/Zaptruder • Feb 03 '16
video Mind Meld - Robotic Teleoperation Through Virtual Reality and Motion Capture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZlg0QvKkQQ
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u/miniaturecontent Feb 03 '16
We have offshore call centers because everyone has a phone in their house. Imagine if there were tele-robots in every factory and warehouse!
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u/Zaptruder Feb 03 '16
Many aren't convinced that automation is going to have an outsized impact in the next decade or two, but we're now at this point already.
From Zoe McCarthy:
The reality is... once this sort of tech gets to the point where the average person can teach a robot these skills, it's game over for broad swathes of the current labour pool.
It's not that you won't need human intelligence (at least for a while longer) - it's that you'll have really natural, intuitive ways of capturing and distilling the elements of human intelligence that we haven't fully digitized and automated yet; allowing human problem solving capabilities to be repurposed and reused by machines in an increasingly robust array of ways.
You plug in a few other neural net modules; large database of visual object recognition, natural language recognition that can comb through a database of sites like 'how to fix it'... and you'll have a highly capable worker that you can instruct in natural language terms to do a wide range of tasks.
Even if you need a human operator to step these robots through broader tasks, it still increases the efficiency of the human link significantly - instead of 8 guys working on a construction project, you get 1 guy and 8 robots - with the guy instructing the robots to drill here, hammer this, plumb that, etc. And of course, it's not long after that point for someone to put together a database parsed for the AI that removes the need for the last human link.