Post 16: Robotics Reflection

One of the learning objectives of all capstones is to give students "an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts." To that end, this week you will write a reflection on the potential positive and negative impacts of assistive robots on the economy, society and the environment.

As computer science students, it is quite easy to be seduced into believing that the proliferation of autonomous systems in everyday life is only beneficial. We see research into humanoid robots capable of repeating the actions of a person. Advances are made every day in computer vision, as more and more computing resources are available for use to train larger and larger models. Ethics regarding robots creep closer and closer to being at the foreground of modern ethical dilemmas. On the topic of assistive care, robots are already being employed to transport items from one place to another in large buildings, such as hospitals, reducing the burden of caregivers to focus on less menial and more intensive caregiving activities. Future robots may be able to provide repetitive care to a disabled or in-need patient, including bringing living necessities such as food and water, tend to wounds, and disinfect surfaces, just to name a few possibilities. We've already seen the impact of the Stretch robot in its ability to give disabled people some kind of control over their environment in ways never before imagined, and thereby connect and interact with others in the tactile modality. 

Beyond healthcare, tech enthusiasts and companies often tout that robots will “replace” or “augment” tough labor jobs that most people might not want to do. For that ideal, it sounds great in theory - theres a lot of hard labor jobs like construction, or unsanitary jobs like sewer management that robots can help do. As robots become more advanced, we begin to push the boundary on the role of humans in society to higher and higher levels of abstraction away from the actual task being done. I.E. farming used to be farmers tilling the fields for example, to using tractors to do the same task, to potentially robots doing all this work at the push of a button through monitoring a dashboard. This means that on aggregate, more people will work on intellectually harder problems which should in turn increase knowledge generation. Whether this is an ideal society is debatable. There have been immense efforts in the robotics community to use robots to clean up environmental disasters like radioactive or toxic environments, and even have automated swimming robots to clean up trash in the oceans. In that sense, robotics has immense potential to help humans coexist better with their environment. 

Robots are not, however, without their own human cost. As robots automate more and more things, they tend to compete with humans for low-paying jobs. And while the healthcare industry may not be in as much risk of complete automation, it is certainly not immune, and it is not hard to imagine robots making competition for nurses more intense in some contexts, such as hospices and senior homes. And while it is often argued that automating jobs produces jobs to maintain the automation, such jobs tend to be much more technical in nature and possess a significant education barrier, overall making a job market that is already extremely education-gated in the context of the healthcare system even more so. Even disregarding this, putting robots in positions of caregiving removes human-to-human interactions with patients, and replacing too much human interaction can be detrimental to the mental health of a patient. Virtual interaction is a stopgap and not a permanent solution – we learned how much people need real humans from the pandemic – so care must be taken when integrating autonomous robots to preserve the human element. And with rising automation comes rising energy consumption. Especially in situations where the local power generation is not primarily composed of renewable energy, applications of robotics must at least be aware of the impact to the environment that replacing human power with machine power may have.

As a personal anecdote, one of our team members had an internship at a robotics startup in the Bay Area a few years ago and during a Lyft ride back home, he experienced immense pushback from his driver on the morality of working for a robotics company. The driver stated that his mom was part of a union that the creation of a certain type of robots would end up disrupting and replacing completely. As engineers and roboticists, we often focus on the technology that we create and fail to see the first and second order effects that our products might have. Infamously, the inventor of dynamite never intended it to be used as a weapon of destruction, and robots might be in a similar vein, a pandora’s box. Social disruption and technology has almost always gone hand-in-hand, as structural unemployment comes with the rise of technology. As mentioned above as well, increasing hardware demands for advanced technologies like cryptography and robotics could end up doing even more harm to the environment. Robotics “waste” is also likely to be a problem in the future, as broken parts will become more common the same way mobile phone waste increased. Robots will undoubtedly be a boon for capitalist economies as wealth generation will increase, the only question is whether these robots will create wealth for the already wealthy, or provide tangible benefit and wealth to the middle and lower class.