An oddity about the gangs of robot labourers that are supposedly about to take our jobs, leaving humanity to watch daytime TV and survive off a universal basic income, is that people who make robots for a living tend to talk them down.
Junji Tsuda should know. His company, Yaskawa Electric, sells $3bn worth of robots a year to car factories. “The robot brain is developing incredibly fast. The biggest problem is the hands that do the work,” he said last year. “They’re not going to develop on an exponential curve, like computers. It’s going to be linear, steady growth.”
These android dreams reflect a mistaken belief that “technology” advances rapidly, and so any and all technological problems will find their solution in a reasonable span of time. Robots exist; technology is developing fast; therefore robots will soon take over the world.