In medicine, robots and AI should, and I’d are are most likely to, amount to very sophisticated tools used by human doctors to enhance their abilities rather than replacing them, even for “simple” surgery. For a lot of menial and repetitive jobs, they might make lots of people unemployed, as already is the case for the past decades, however strongly accelerated as development advances and provides ever growing capabilities paired with better understanding of different tasks, problems and solutions to them. Replacing more and more of those jobs that are primarily a waste of people’s time and energy is a good thing, forcing moves towards improvements in governance, social systems and economy and opening up the possibility for humans to do more fulfilling things. No one should have to work at supermarkets or amazon warehouses to make ends meet. It’s already dehumanizing, so we should follow through and aim at taking the burden off of humans as much as possible, leaving at the maximum some human overseers to ensure performance, safety and remind people that humans are running it.
The VCs are just there to cash in on the transition, where governments and “the economy” go “this is fine, we’re ‘productive’ and making shitloads of money on people’s backs”. Any idea there is only ever judged by how much money it can make for someone with enough money to finance its execution, otherwise they’re deemed “impractical”. A lot of what’s coming out of this ends up useless and way too inflexible as a it’s not a goal to produce something great, but make money as quickly as possible.
Imo, cases like the nursing robot are not the best use of anyone’s time and resources…also coming with that super small-print subtext “let’s stash away the elderly with some robots because no one wants to deal with that, right`?”. I’m willing to bet more people would care and perform those tasks if they didn’t have to fear for their own livelihood. That’s not an opportunity for someone’s short- to mid-term monetary gains though.
Focussing on distilling expert capabilities and knowledge (e.g. well performing cashiers at walmart are experts at what they do) it into technological systems that can be used to automate (at least partially – augment) and further improve on the function of the expert seems more useful. At the same time, it’s way harder to achieve. Anything really that gets us away from the idea of “creating jobs” in the sense of quantity to bypass the need to improve our large nationwide/global systems and instead makes us face the reality that we could sustain what we have and even growth without burning humans out to do it.
