Smartphones were an exercise in making things we already had in 1995 smaller and faster. i.e. largely an engineering task. When you talk about robots that can repair themselves i.e. something which requires creativity and intelligent thought, you're talking about pushing the boundaries of several scientific disciplines far beyond where they are today. That is to say, in 1995 you could definitively answer that yes, it's theoretically possible to create an internet enabled hand held device. Today, there is no theoretical basis for even believing machine learning can *ever* match the reasoning or creative capabilities of a human brain.

Good luck to them. Hopefully they make some headway by the time I'm 120 and can upload my consciousness to the internet.

And yet self driving cars and true artificial intelligence are always "ten years away".

The same amount of thinking I'm willing to give what I should do after the sun explodes or the heat death of the universe. Thinking about such things is a flight of fancy, fueled by a science fiction and a popular media depiction of machine learning and AI.

You're arguing about the future while thinking about the complexity and capability of robots today, and again (as I argued in another post to you) considering only robots that replace factory labor... which robots of the future will do of course but go well beyond. You think it's as easy as just swapping out components? Maybe my future robot butler keeps knocking over my lamp with its arm. So I swap out the arm and it keeps doing it. I swap out the eye and it keeps doing it. I swap out the brain and it keeps doing it.... now what? This is a common problem that I face every day... debugging and repairing robots is not as easy as "hot swapping" modules because we're talking about machines which interact with their (nonlinear dynamic) world and make choices on their own based on input. Robots of the future that everyone is so worried about will not be your grandfather's robots.

You think the debugging stops when it's shipped? With robots it's an ongoing process.

And yet my car has been to the mechanic four times and they still can't seem to get the check engine light to turn off... cars, mainframes... these machines are weaving looms compared to the kind of complexity robots of the future will have. How much of the outside world does your mainframe interact with? How many autonomous decisions does it make? For a machine that sits in one spot and does one job, it's not amazing that it can tell you what's wrong with it.

Wrong. First, the decision hinges on a net reduction in *costs* not employment. A net reduction of costs can cause a company to grow, which can result in a net *gain* of employment. Consider a factory which takes 10 workers on an assembly line and 10 workers to manage operations. Robots replace the 10 workers on the assembly line, allowing the company to save money, and open a second robotically-controlled factory which again takes 10 workers to manage.

Second, when you use the words "net loss" you're talking with respect to the company that purchased the robot. What about the company that sold the robot? They need workers too, and they now have money to grow and expand, creating jobs. What about the company that sells to the company that makes the robot? Now they have more money to grow and expand as well. Perhaps the workers fired from the assembly line can now be re-trained and hired elsewhere.

Third, you're neglecting the other D's. Robots are best suited for dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs. Humans are mainly replicable in the dull category, which your post and most other posts here are focusing on. But some jobs are too dirty or too dangerous for humans to manage. Consider nuclear waste disposal. Or bomb/landmine disposal. These are not suitable jobs for humans, and a net gain of jobs can be created for humans who support robots that do these jobs. Or consider jobs that are impossible for a human, like exploring the deep reaches of space or the ocean. Robots in these fields replace zero human jobs and creating jobs for those who support these robots.

Fourth, your neglecting robots that help or augment human ability. Consider an autonomous wheelchair robot that helps an elderly man navigate his town. You've enabled a man who maybe stayed in his house all day to become an active member of society. Again, you create jobs by supporting autonomous wheelchair development and support more jobs by getting this man active and involved in the community/economy and extending his life. Jobs eliminated? Maybe a single support person who used to push him around. Or maybe that person is still around but just doesn't push him anymore.

Or what about robots that fit on to a soldier, allowing him to carry more weight. The soldier is still there, so you didn't eliminate his job, you've just made him better at it. Jobs eliminated? Zero. Jobs gained? Maybe dozens to construct, build, market, and support that robot exoskeleton.

This is vastly overstated. We have robots that can see and throw and catch well in carefully controlled laboratory experiments, and published results and videos carefully present the 10 successes out of hundreds of failures. I saw a talk in the fall by Marc Raibert, the former CEO of Boston Dynamics. I'm sure you've seen the impressive Cheetah and Big Dog videos. He referenced those and then told us "and these are the videos you don't see online" and proceeded to show us about a dozen clips of big dog falling off cliffs and the Cheetah running in to a parked car at full speed. When you say these things are "very close" to production, I'd still given them 15-20 years minimum.

You'd be surprised how many jobs require even the tiniest modicum of creativity and reasoning, and how impossible even the tiniest modicum of creativity and reasoning is hard for a machine. Let's come back here in 15 years and see who is right, eh?

Because we're talking about different degrees of "future", one of which is much closer than the other, and is therefore practical to consider while the other is at this point a fairy tale. When you talk about robots repairing themselves, you're talking about first diagnosing the problem, which requires logic, inference, rationalizing cause/effect, problem solving, creativity, etc. Robots of the future will be very complex, nonlinear, dynamic, interacting systems, and most likely will not be able to self-diagnose, the same way even a human cannot self-diagnose most problems. The robots I work with do some very strange things sometimes, and it takes a long time to come to the exact reason *why* it behaved as it did, and fix it, even with an intimate understanding of all the implemented systems. I can't even imagine how impossible a robot of the future will be to diagnose.

Then when you reach a diagnosis you're talking about the actual repair job, which again is a hard job that often requires some creativity and problem solving, something machines are not well suited for. We're not talking about replacing a panel and a headlight on a banged up car. We're talking about complex machines that make decisions and interact with a dynamic world in a nonlinear way. Fixing such a machine will not automatable any more than fixing a human is.

So I've used a couple of words above (creativity, problem solving, rationalization, inference) that hint at some of the deepest most profound questions of human understanding and knowledge. Talking about machines capable of these tasks is some serious science fiction. When we start talking about robots possessing these qualities, let's also start worrying about a robot apocalypse while we're at it.

A couple of points here. First, it takes 10 people to maintain today's machines that do the work of 100 people. These machines, as I've posted elsewhere, are highly simplistic as far as robots go. Limited sensing and perception, limited cognition, very limited degrees of freedom, no mobility, specialized actuators, etc. Fixing simple machines is simple. A robot of tomorrow will be much more complex, requiring more people with more specialized knowledge to service them. Much like you have mechanics who specialize in transmissions, or even more aptly doctors who specialize in hearts, you will have robot "technicians" who specialize in perception, locomotion, "brains", electronics, drive systems, etc. Think about how many doctors a human needs, due to their sheer complexity. This is more along the lines of how a robot repair industry would develop.

But not everyone needs to be a robot repair technician, just as not everyone in the healthcare industry is a doctor or surgeon. You've forgotten that a robot technician also works for a company. A robot technician would also be supported by non automatable non-technical jobs (management, sales, marketing, HR, legal... anything with a human-facing or creative component). I could even imagine different tiers of knowledge, where some technicians perform routine maintenance (like a nurse), some technicians simply diagnose (like a doctor), and some technicians repair (like a surgeon). Maybe someone replaced on the assembly line could re-train to a human-facing job that doesn't have to be highly technical. Will there be enough such jobs? I don't know, I can only guess. But I can see the job creation/destroyed ratio is much better than 10/100.

tl;dr - repairing robots is/will be a new *industry* not a new *job*.

K. S. Kyosuke's reply mirrors some of what I have to reply to your post, so I incorporate what he posted here, but would also like to add the following:

The most deployed robots today are industrial arms like Kukas, and I suspect that's what your brother repairs. The reason for this is because they are very simple as far as robots go. The future I'm talking about will have several orders of magnitude more robots than there are today, they will be as ubiquitous as cars, and will be so complex that they make current industrial robots look like tinker toys. Given the complexity of robots of the future, I would expect the support industry around them to resemble something like the healthcare industry, filled with specialists who focus on diagnosing or repairing the brain, electronics, perception, mechanics, etc.; general practitioners who would be like your local corner auto mechanic, who could fix the common problems and give referrals to specialists; and a highly specialized components industry which would resemble medical equipment manufacturers and distributors. An industry like this can support hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs.

And most of that work isn't going away in the near future. With the current state of robots, you're talking about taking away the most dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs out there. Some robots will even have jobs that humans aren't capable of doing because they are so dangerous or dirty. Any jobs for these robots will be a net gain in employment, creating jobs surrounding and supporting the robot that were not possible before.

Again, as for those replaced by robots, well, tough. Your job is now done by a machine. Find something else to do.

If you think that's coming any time in the near or even distant future, you have absolutely zero knowledge of what robots are actually capable of. As someone who designs robots for a living, you can rest assured that humans will be the ones designing and repairing robots for a long time to come.

It was the same "type" insofar as both made you go forward faster than walking. That's about where the similarities end between the horse/buggy industry and the automobile industry. Horsewhip makers really have no transferrable skills in a world where horsewhips don't make cars go faster. And yet the world moved on. Shocking.

And what of the millions of auto workers and those in peripheral industries who gained their jobs due to automation. I mean.... do you realize an AUTOmobile is a form of automation in itself? We automated the horse. Sure, all the horsewhip and buggy manufacturers lost their jobs, but in their place sprouted an even larger industry. I mean, there is a gas station and auto repair shop on almost every corner in my town. When robots become as ubiquitous, there will be many industries surrounding their support. Expect to see robot repair shops, with robot mechanics and technicians some time in the future.

Horse whip makers were once made obsolete, but the automation that replaced them (automobiles. Auto is right in the name!) created an industry that is now many orders of magnitude larger than the horse whip industry ever was.

Maybe your job goes away. As a roboticist, I get even more job opportunities. Sorry you chose the wrong field. For those who were made obsolete by robots, well that's progress. Maybe they can retrain as someone who repairs the robots that replaced them.

Wow, Windows really is reaching new lows here.

The word only here was not used to diminish the significance of the interface criticisms, but to refute the claim that Windows 8 is "Windows 8 is shit, from top to bottom." If Windows 8 is shift from bottom to top, yet the only thing people really have a problem with is the interface, then Windows 8 isn't really shit from bottom to top now is it?

Um, you can *very easily* use even stock Windows 8 without ever using the Metro interface or a metro app. Since update 1, Windows 8.1 is now even easier to use on a desktop setup. They have addressed pretty much every criticism of the Metro UI except for the start menu at this point. As far as I can tell, most of the criticisms on this site are outdated by about 6 months with regards to the Metro UI, because people here would rather talk out of their asses than from true experience.

Apple just lit 3 Billion Dollars on fire? Awesome! It's not like they could have used that money for more important things like improving their own audio hardware using their own iconic music brand, start their own music service using their established music industry contacts and programming team, bought both Spotify and Pandora and still have enough money left to make the first rap star billionaire.

At this rate, Steve Jobs will be vertical due to the sheer speed of his spinning corpse.

No. Artificial neural networks are inspired by biology, but that's where the similarity ends. Any conclusion drawn from an ANN should not be cast onto their biological counterparts.

For some people, careers aren't about ROI. I wouldn't do mobile app development for a million dollars.

I agree with everything you said except fitting an IMU in the pen. I think it wouldn't be that hard or expensive to fit one of these in a pen: http://www.invensense.com/mems...