Work in the Age of Robots by Mark P. Mills

Author:Mark P. Mills [Mills, Mark P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641770286
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2018-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

The coming robotification of services

Venture-capital investment offers a window into the kinds of technology that will drive future productivity gains. Here we see, in the CBInsights tracking of robot investments, that service-oriented—rather than industrial—applications dominate, with 80% of the $3 billion of venture capital in the past four years put to work on next-generation robots. Investors made bets on companies developing robots for retail, warehouse, delivery, laboratory, educational, surgical, hospital, rehab, safety, security, environmental monitoring and “social” applications. Clearly, innovators and investors think that services represent a great opportunity for success.

Infusing software into hardware—to make true cyberphysical systems, such that they become functionally, invisibly and reliably part of the world of atoms—is challenging. Unlike the purely cyber world, the physical world has things like inertia, friction, gravity and non-linear random events, all with serious safety implications. The real (as opposed to virtual) world cannot tolerate the equivalent of frozen screens, reboots, video jitter or iterations of software upgrades to clean up sloppy code rushed to market. But cyberphysical technologies are improving rapidly, and we have already seen “first fission.” But long before we see practical general-purpose robots, we will see commercially viable task-specific ones for applications across the service sectors.

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