George Rebane

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas featured advances in robotics.  They are now coming out of the R&D pipeline in droves showing all kinds of capabilities in vision, manipulation, mobility, smarts, and even emotion.  One of the featured robots was the ‘Little Helper’ robot that is designed to work in manufacturing facilities doing tasks that require moving around a shop floor, handling materials, reasoning, and seeing and doing the right thing.  In short, tasks that used to be the sole province of human workers.  (see video)

These mechanical critters are being developed to fill jobs in advanced countries with low worker birth rates like Denmark and Japan.  During these pre-Singularity (also see Singularity catergory on right) years as they begin to fill positions in industry, you can expect their abilities to explode in handling more and more complex work while their costs of acquisition and maintenance go down.  Here is the IEEE news website on robotics for a wider view of current advances in the different areas where robots are both augmenting and supplanting humans.

Given the sorry record of our K-12 public education, doesn’t that make your think about what it would take to remake the whole system into a meritocracy instead of maintaining it as bulwark of politically correct, union-saddled mediocracy?