Impacts and Considerations of humanoid / in-house Robotics

Robots that can do our jobs (or at least many of the tasks) and interact with our environment I believe are inevitable. Likewise, I believe this will result in job displacement, and I believe for many it may severely limit what kinds of jobs are available. How this shift in job opportunities affects our society will be up to our government’s and its legislation. It is important to consider -and where possible - prepare for impact.

I do not believe the answer is to limit or restrict where and how robots can be used (there are certainly places where robotic use does need to be restricted, but my point is that I don’t think it’s a good long term blanket approach to prevent job loss). I think instead, we need to be prepared to have a paradigm shift in some industries to expand employment.

To expand on this, robots can be used to do many jobs without the liability and inconsistency by some people filling the roll. However, people still need jobs -and I don’t mean this in a shallow people need jobs so they can buy food / water / shelter sort of perspective- I mean people need to fulfill a purpose to remain positive and engaging individuals that can contribute to their community (hopefully I can find some citation for this).

People are programmed to be teachers, to be mentors, to be caretakers, and those are some industries that are suffering greatly due to low staffing - either due to misappropriated or inadequate funding. People are programmed to write stories and music, to create pictures, movies, experiments, and contraptions. And we also have some big challenges to solve both in the sciences and medical fields, all the while I have not even touched all the other professions that could use some extra eyes and ears. Those are the kinds of jobs I think -we as a society- will need to negotiate better support for through government in order to keep employment up. I realize various computing techniques such as LLMs (often under the marketing label "AI") will also help in this space, but I’m afraid that will be limited to poorly sanitized training data for a long time, and we will still need human ingenuity in all of these spaces for a long time to come.

The point in all this rambling is to emphasize that robotics have a wonderful opportunity to significantly improve all of our lives, but we all need to work together to make this happen, because like all things it is also possible this sort of technology could be used in a way that is highly corrosive and degrading to the quality of life for a large majority of people.

Similarly, robotics can ensure we can support our populations in doing some of the tasks many of us wish we didn’t have to do, but I also don’t want to denigrate what things some people love to do. I worked at Burger King when I was in high school, and every job in that restaurant could have been run by a robot, but there are some people who really enjoy working in those sorts of environments that some people see as low-skill labor. Those jobs still need people to service the robots and to do the things better where a robot may perform inadequately. I believe those that stay will become experts and capable of take on detail that may be cost-prohibitive to design for, while those that leave will be moving on into roles that they feel might be more fulfilling.

To emphasize, the number of people we can support by introducing robotics into service industries and as home service robots does not magically reduce, but it could easily reduce job supply which would create downward pressure on salaries and wages in those roles. One way to prevent a substantial impact to job markets is to increase supply in other areas and attempt to smooth out the transition.

At the end of the day, there is a fixed set of resources that can be converted to goods to provide for people, and all robotic automations does on a global average is reduce human labor requirements. This is a good thing as it means -if implemented properly- we can all live more stress-free and fulfilling lives.

(Chart 1 here showing human consumption and output)

(Chart 2 here showing available resources to create goods and services, and to show how human labor would be displaced with the introduction of robot labor)