Factory Automation & Industrial Robots
The view of automation in factories being giant, custom-built, expensive, efficient but dumb robots are of the past. Baxter is an example of the new form of automation (Pierce, 2013). As opposed to traditional robots that require which require skilled operators and technicians and millions of dollars, Baxter has vision and can learn what you want him to do by watching you do it (Rethink Robotics, 2018). Baxter can be programmed by moving its hand to perform a task whose motions the computer will then memorize and be able to repeat the task.
While most of other industrial robots require computer programmers to code them over many hours, Baxter can be repurposed quickly across jobs in minutes. Computers were once a highly custom and expensive technology, but when general-purpose computers appeared, demand spiked, and they quickly became crucial to everything. Ever since the end of the second world war, factory automation has pushed the proportion of people in the US who are working in manufacturing has declined steadily, from nearly 40% during the war to less than 10% today (Lebergott, 1966), and for the reasons above, general purpose robotics will drastically push that number sharply down.
The bulk of lawyering is drafting legal documents, predicting the likely outcome, impact of lawsuits, and discovery. Discovery is already not a human job as research bots can accurately sift through millions documents instead of hours than weeks. Saving time and money (Hyman, et al., 2015). IBMs Watson's is programmed to be the best doctor in the world: to understand what people say in their own words and give back accurate diagnoses (Ferrucci, Levas, Bagchi, Gondek, & T.Mueller, 2013).
Human doctors are severely limited in dealing with a one's complicated medical history and can only improve through their own experience. At the same time to understanding every drug and its interaction with every other drug is beyond the scope of human knowability. Especially when there are research robots whose whole job it is to test thousands of these new drugs at a time. Doctor bots can learn from the experiences of every doctor bot. Can read the latest in medical research and keep track of everything that happens to all his patients world-wide and make correlations that would be impossible to find otherwise. In the examples above all doctors and lawyers do not have to go but when such technologies are available as far away as your phone, the need for these professions will decrease (Ford, 2013).
