The need for automation is industries can be very many. Protection of workers, improvement of efficiency and releasing human capital from monotonous tasks for redeployment in other better rewarding jobs are a few that quickly come to my mind.
Automation has opened up relatively new vistas of opportunities including robotics. Extending the benefits of automation to robotics, all of us can be put to ease our concerns about robots that were sown in our fertile imagination from Sci-fi literature and movies. Yes! The benefits do seem to outweigh all concerns but with few words of caution. We do get over-zealous with new toys in our hands from the time we were all kids. Now robotics is being used in applications that were never thought about a few years back or maybe, by the science fiction writers.
In the recent few years we are increasingly surrounded by a lot of artificial life – artificial intelligence and robotics. Robotics are being put to good use in repetitive tasks, material handling, and hazardous environments. But some use cases that are quite outlandish are robot chefs, robot bartenders, robot waiters and so on. These innovations are novel, but they do pose a lot of risks. What will you do if the robot chef or the robot bartender turn malicious? A wicked mind can infect the robotic codes and use these robots for ulterior purposes. Who is going to keep a check on the imagination of these over-zealous innovators? Who will protect the humans from robotic zombies?
Like any innovation, this advancement is also throwing up challenges that need to be addressed. As we welcome change, we also need to prepare for the challenges.