Brainy Robots to Put Us Out of Work, on Vacation and in School?

In the future robots will take over many tasks performed by American workers today potentially leading to increased unemployment, says Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works and author of e-book Robotic Nation.

"In theory we should all be able to go on a perpetual vacation as robots do all the work," Brain told attendees in a presentation at the Singularity Summit in San Jose. "Instead because of the way the economy is structured right now, when robots arrive it will have devastating effects on all of us because there will be so many unemployed people."

The implications of an increasingly automated economy could be dire for society unless we restructure our economy, he argues.

While productivity has risen over the year, worker compensation has not kept pace and there is increasing concentration of wealth, says Brain.

Developments in robotics means that technologists could be creating a second intelligent species, claims Brain. "So far no credible evidence to indicate that there is more than one intelligent species in the universe, which is us," he says. "But that changes with the robots."

Computational power has significantly increased in the last two decades and is growing exponentially. In 1992, computers could perform about 300,000 operations per second. By 2022, it is likely to jump to a trillion operations per second and by 2042 it could be a quadrillion operations per second, predicts Brain.

"A $500 machine that can do that, whenever it happens, combined with vision and natural language processing could change how we look at robots," he says.

Potential applications of robots could then be in use as automatons in fast food restaurants, transportation, education, construction and retail among other areas. "We will have robotic cashiers, robotic stocking, sweeping, help and cart retrieval at Wal-Mart," says Brain.