Duc Pham, Chance professor of engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham
First of all, my apologies to the BBC for adapting the title of its 1979 Horizon documentary The Robots Are Coming. As I have stated previously, the first wave of robots has indeed arrived1. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFC), in 2019, there were 2.7 million industrial robots operating in factories around the world2 and 23.4 million service robots working in professional, personal and domestic settings3. In accordance with Pham’s Fourth Law of Robotics, those robots are here to stay1. Granted, they will grow old and be replaced by new generation machines at some time in the future. However, as a breed, once they have demonstrated that they can cost-effectively take over a job from humans, they and then their offspring will continue to do so in perpetuity: robotisation is an irreversible process.
Now, a second wave is looming on the horizon, namely robots with cognitive abilities approaching or even exceeding those of humans, at least in some respects. This wave is being fuelled by the availability of affordable massive computing power and a global web of instantly accessible digital data and information, coupled with great leaps in artificial intelligence (AI). We saw an example of a state-of-the-art cognitive robot and what it could do in Project Debater, which I reviewed a couple of years ago4. Developed by IBM, the system was shown to be capable of debating with humans. The matters deliberated were diverse, ranging from subsidies for space exploration and the use of telemedicine to the pros and cons of mass surveillance and genetic engineering. Project Debater was able to listen to its human counterpart, analyse their arguments, formulate counter arguments and give cogent responses in real time.
It is easy to imagine Project Debater, with its superhuman capacity for accessing vast amounts of information and piecing together relevant details to find the answer to almost any problem at lightning speeds, acting as an expert advisor on virtually any subject. And with such an omnipotent AI on tap, one might well ask why would anyone still need to attend schools or universities? A system like Project Debater could be made available as a cloud service to the entire population for solving everyday and specialist problems. In a more futuristic and perhaps far-fetched scenario, it could be programmed into a quantum computer chip for implanting in the brain, enabling people to possess encyclopaedic knowledge.
Science fiction aside, with just a little stretch of the imagination, one could envisage Project Debater mastering a specific subject—say, robotics, micromanufacturing or quantum mechanics—and teaching it at least as competently as a human does. In other words, Project Debater could act as a ‘probot’, or ‘professor robot’, and join its industrial and service cousins in their unrelenting efforts to displace human workers. Fortunately and as I have posited before, until the work needed to tailor Project Debater to a given discipline can be automated (and the field of AI can produce robots with other human qualities such as empathy, intuition and creativity), the prospect of academics being replaced en masse by probots is not yet likely4. AI will continue making an impact on every aspect of life including education, and the probots will come, although perhaps not for another twenty or thirty years.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/mechanical-engineering/index.aspx
References
1Pham, D.T. (2014). The Fourth Law of Robotics (or the robots are staying). CMM, volume 7, issue 1.
Available at: https://bit.ly/35B7VwO
2International Federation of Robotics (IFR) (2020). Executive summary world robotics 2020 industrial robots.
Available at https://bit.ly/32UDVKC
3International Federation of Robotics (IFR) (2020). Executive summary world robotics 2020 service robots.
Available at: https://bit.ly/36KW5zt
4Pham, D.T. (2014). I, Probot. CMM, volume 11, issue 4.Available at: https://bit.ly/2IDSPOA