The Robot Butler Did It!

The good news is that the near future is going to see some rapid, revolutionary changes that could dramatically enhance our lives. The bad news is that the technologies pitched to “become successful and transformative” in the next decade or so are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of back-door, front-door, and side-door compromises.

In 5 years, a robot could be your boss

Not surprisingly, many managers feel threatened by robots -- managers in electronics and high tech are most concerned that robots could threaten their positions (50%), followed by banking managers (49%), managers in the airline sector (42%) and retail (41%), the Accenture data show-- as do many workers.

A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities

The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.

Robots Could Fill Half of Jobs in Japan by 2035

According to media reports, Japan's residents mostly welcomed the imminent "robo-revolution" because on the one hand it would allow the mitigation of economic pressure on the quickly growing number of aging people across the nation, while on the other it could provide job seekers with the ability to conduct more creative work.

The More Robots We Bring into Society, the More We're Forced to Behave Like Them

This scenario is still a very long way off, and it’s tenable that our home appliances already force a certain kind of robotic regularity on us anyway. Nevertheless, if such corporations as Toyota do bring us to the stage where personal robots and AI are a daily fixture in our routines, we will have to tread carefully, since this encroachment would amount to our robotization.