By Kayla Rabin

03/28/2020

Artificial intelligence and service robotics are becoming increasingly more embedded into our society. In class, we talked about a restaurant called “Spyce”, located in Boston and established by MIT students, which has a fully automated robotic kitchen that prepares/cooks food for their customers, and then actual people deliver the finished product to the customer. You can go on a cruise ship and have a robotic bartender make you an alcoholic drink, you can ask Amazon’s Alexa virtually anything and she’ll adhere to your command/answer your question within minutes. SIRI and facial recognition on the iPhone, Tesla’s self-driving cars, and even Google’s search engine algorithms are all aspects of artificial intelligence and/or service robotics that are now available and utilized in society. There are many benefits that come along with this increase in the usage of artificial intelligence and service robotics, but there are also some consequences that we’ll have to deal with as a society in the future as well. I think artificial intelligence and service robotics are innovative and helpful new technologies, but at the same time, I do fear a future in which robots are too powerful or too significant in the world, that people lose sight of how important human to human interaction is to sustain a normal, healthy life.

Robotic bartender on cruise

The benefits of artificial intelligence and service robotics are that they increase overall efficiency and make daily life easier for consumers. Both new technologies have proven to be very productive and profitable for companies that choose to incorporate it into their business model. On the other hand though, there are some potential disadvantages to think about when considering the future of artificial intelligence and service robotics.  A scary thought to have, especially after watching movies like iRobot starring Will Smith, is that artificial intelligence/robotics could one day become overly competent with goals that misalign with ours. In this scenario, it seems as though humans would fall inferior to these super smart robots. A more realistic consequence of embedding artificial intelligence and service robotics further into our society is that it will take away thousands of jobs for humans. Jobs such as cashiers, receptionists, telemarketers and bank tellers etc. are all jobs that can be easily replaced by robots. Any job that consists of taking down information from other humans and inputting it into a system, would be done much more productively and efficiently with a robot, and you don’t have to pay a robot a salary since they don’t have basic human necessities or families like we do.

Tesla Self-Driving car

Advancements in technology are inevitable. I learned about Moore’s law in one of the management classes that I’ve taken at Lehigh, and that law essentially states that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years. Keeping this law in mind, and considering how much technology has changed and advanced over my own lifetime, I cannot even fathom the types of artificial intelligence and service robotics that we would have two decades from now. All I can hope for is that people still value human interactions and respect that some things are just better off being done by a human instead of a robot.

Spyce restaurant in Boston, MA.

Reference

1. https://futureoflife.org/background/benefits-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/?cn-reloaded=1
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvzNuw5VjBU
3. https://www.robotics.org/service-robots/what-are-professional-service-robots