Your Next Colleague Could Be An Embodied Robot

Forbes

a day ago

It was a blink and you'll miss it moment – an academic job posting on LinkedIn, the type of thing most people would just scroll by and then read about someone who is 'humbled and honored' to be doing something. But for those of us paying attention to the embodied robotics space, it was definitely worth a pause. The University of Lincoln in the UK was looking for someone to develop a 'revolutionary gamified Virtual Reality environment where non-experts can train AI-powered harvesting robots through bodily demonstrations, eliminating the need for complex programming or field-based training.' Long story short, the aim is to replace field workers with machines – but it is likely these machines will be powered by humans for the time being.This isn't an entirely new concept – a grocery store in Toronto employed robots powered by people in VR headsets to stock shelves last year, and the Family Mart convenience store chain in Japan has been using this technology for a few years. But it has remained a relatively niche use case, at least until now. In the coming years, as more research is funded and this area grows, it could transform the future of work, migration, and economic mobility.First, the potential upsides. Picking fruits and vegetables in a field is difficult and dangerous work, and very few people actually want to do it. With changes in the climate, the work is only getting worse, and already farms in the US are sounding alarms about worker shortages due to current immigration policies. Stocking grocery shelves is far less dangerous, but it's not exactly glamorous work either, and there is still the potential to be injured on the job lugging heavy boxes or repeating the same physical task over and over.And the applications for this technology go far beyond just these two use cases. If you live in New York City, you're familiar with DoorDash and Uber Eats drivers on e-bikes and scooters zooming around the city. Because they are incentivized to deliver as many orders as possible as quickly as possible, they often ride at high speeds on sidewalks or in bike lanes, creating a dangerous situation for themselves and other cyclists and pedestrians. They also have to make deliveries in all manner of dangerous weather conditions.But now imagine a robot that can make those deliveries, powered by a driver in a headset. The delivery person still has a job, but rather than risking life and limb on a bike, they are sitting in a comfortable chair in a temperature controlled room, wearing a VR headset to control the delivery robot. The robots could come with a built in speed cap and other safety features, and pre-programmed rules to keep a driver from going rogue. And if one of those robots gets hit by a bus, it's a hassle for the person waiting for a pizza and a small cost for the company that owns the robot. If a human being is hit by a bus, that's the loss of someone's child, sibling, or parent.But for all the upsides of this, there are plenty of downsides. For one, the grocery store in Canada hired workers in the Philippines to pilot their robots, and paid them the prevailing wage for their local market. All of a sudden, local workers are suddenly displaced and their wages are undercut. Jobs that were thought to be safe from off-shoring and AI are all of sudden at very real risk. The endgame here is to create enough training data that AI could eventually autonomously run these robots, thus creating even more job loss.Because many of these low-wage jobs are done by recent immigrants, it will have a massive impact on migration patterns. Many immigrants who are leaving their home countries for economic opportunity would relish being able to stay with their families and make money to benefit their communities. On the other hand, the classic American story of a generation of new immigrants working the fields in order to send a child to college and set them on a path to the middle class would be effectively cut off.Workers will also be isolated from each other, which would have profound effects both on labor organizations and the loneliness epidemic. If you spend all your time working in a headset, you'll never get to talk to anyone, and if you want to advocate for better pay or conditions, good luck doing it remotely. This type of work will also become increasingly precarious for those who want to do it full time; a college student likely won't venture on to the streets of NYC to make deliveries between classes, but could easily pop on a headset and crank out a few in their spare time.We are still at the dawn of this technology, but it will have a profound impact on work in the next several years. Don't be surprised if sometime in 2030 you see a human stocking a shelf and think that it's a novel throwback.