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Robots aren’t taking over, they already have

Jun 11, 2017

Is this a glimpse of the future?

We live in a world of robots, and most of us aren’t even aware that they exist. A lot of them aren’t that new either; plenty of them go back 50, 60, even 70 years or more, working away on our behalf and making life easier for us all! Oh, I don’t mean there are a lot of humanoid characters wandering about, switching things on and off for us without our even noticing them, and they don’t usually wear suits or anything like that either, but they are there all the same, so let’s see if we can find a few of them.

Think about driving your car around the city and you will have used one of our most popular robots (some would say unpopular), that have been around for a very long time, making driving easier and safer for us all. In fact, I doubt if we could manage today, without this one! I mean of course the traffic lights you stop at often, if you drive a lot. They carry on, directing traffic for twenty-four hours a day, never tiring and rarely failing, assessing how much traffic is coming one way and giving them a longer time on green, while at the same time taking note of the pedestrians pressing their little buttons, so they can cross too. A simple piece of machinery to be sure, but still a robot!

Even your car is mainly robotic too. I remember, in an earlier car of mine, (a 1922 Morris), I had to manually set the advance-and-retard on the distributor, and the air to fuel mixture for the carburettor, things done automatically for me in my present flashy VW Passat. And yet, a lot of younger readers most likely won’t even know what an ‘advance-and-retard’ or a ‘carburettor’ is. Now, the robot, sitting comfortably under one of your seats or inside a bulkhead somewhere happily attends to these and many other problems and necessities associated with the efficient running of your motor.

Even the average home can’t get far without a few robots these days; the modern washing machine sorts, washes and partially dries all your laundry before sounding a siren to let you know it’s all ready to go in the dryer or on the line. That air conditioner, sitting quietly up on the wall can decide whether you need warm air or cool, whether it should be dried or humidified, and whether it should keep working when there is no one in the room for a while; all automatically decided by the tiny robot inside it. You can now buy automatic vacuum cleaners that decide when to switch themselves on, make their way around your home cleaning, all while you sit around reading a book (sorry, I couldn’t resist that). Even your modern oven is quite capable of working out what temperature and cooking time is required for a particular dish, once you tell it what is in there.

Industry of course, has been using a lot of robots for a long time, not always to the advantage of the workers made redundant by their introduction! Look at any documentary about the car industry and see a factory the length of a football field, with row upon row of partly built cars slowly traversing the place, little more than a chassis at the start but virtually finished by the time they reach the other end, but with barely a single human to be seen it appears, just a mass of things like field guns, quickly swinging about, picking up parts and placing them exactly where they are required, on or in the vehicle! Humans seem to have subsidiary positions in these scenes, just watching to make sure nothing goes wrong (I’m sure some will say I’m completely wrong in this description and I can’t argue with that, but this is just a layman’s view of what appears to be happening).

I don’t suppose we shall ever (in my life time anyway!), have human-like robots about the place, employed to look after the kids while you are at work, or serve petrol in a garage, or make the beds every morning in a hotel, but certainly, in their many other disguises they are here with us and no doubt always will be. I just hope no bright spark of a human comes along and designs a robot that is cleverer than us – if that happens I reckon it will be “goodbye humans”. Ugh!