People often assume the simple things we do every day and pay workers very little for — carrying bags, recognising shapes, asking questions — would be easy to automate. They’re not TimBiggs
If you’ve been to an airport, GPs office or emergency room lately, or have read the widespread reports of worker shortages across a range of industries, you may wonder why we’re not looking into using robots or AIs to fill the gap.Yet while people tend to assume that the simple things we do every day and pay workers very little for — carrying bags, recognising shapes, asking questions — would be easy to automate, it turns out they’re not.
So in an airport scenario, the best place for robots is where they already are; checking people in, weighing bags and printing labels. Potentially moving bags around, but only once they’ve been placed in uniform crates.“The challenge is that suitcases come in all shapes and forms, and handles are in all different places. It would be really, really difficult to get a robot to work out how to loop the luggage label onto it,” Walsh said.
There are simply too many variables to make it safe. But that doesn’t mean they have no place in healthcare; there are several robots being developed and even operated in drug dispensaries. Another thing holding back robots in the workplace is the cost. Autonomous vehicles are likely to remain more expensive for food delivery than a person on a bicycle, for example. But there are examples where robots are put to work despite the cost and the difficulty of the job.
“A future workforce will blend human and AI capabilities. Our ‘machine mates’ will become teammates, and may even have their roles formalised into organisation charts.” “We have all these issues that are going to show up in the data. And what AI is good at, is learning patterns from data.”
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