If robots take place in jobs that are physical exhausting, dangerous, unhealthy, boring e.g. it will bring benefit to mankind.

This will save time, may bring better quality of the products and rise the quality of life.

If this benefit comes to the workers, who did those jobs before, that would be great. 

But here is the crux of the matter: this will not happen. This development is mostly connected with severe social problems, the benefit goes in other directions. It is up to us, up to our politicians, to solve the political problems linked with it.

Everyone can see that robots will replace human in many workplaces. But for a long time remain the jobs where you need creativity, originality of ideas. These jobs will remain for a long time only to humans.

Thank you Vladimir - what is your view on the ability of robots to be empathetic? Some people think artificial intelligence can already achieve this.

Thank you, Tony! We take into account the successes of our time.  In fact, robots are already used in the clinic for patients entertainment. The robots also perform the basic steps in the clinical wards. The possibilities of artificial neural networks provide a self-learning robots. But while still behind all these successes are the designers and specialists in the field of artificial intelligence. Number interneuron communications options in the head of one person exceeds the capabilities of a supercomputer. Therefore sensitivity shades that each person receives individual, will long be modeled.

That's great Vladimir - this reminds of the discussion of mirror neurons, and their role. I admit their existence are still being questioned, but it is interesting to future gaze into possibility. Thank you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/

If robots take place in jobs that are physical exhausting, dangerous, unhealthy, boring e.g. it will bring benefit to mankind.

This will save time, may bring better quality of the products and rise the quality of life.

If this benefit comes to the workers, who did those jobs before, that would be great. 

But here is the crux of the matter: this will not happen. This development is mostly connected with severe social problems, the benefit goes in other directions. It is up to us, up to our politicians, to solve the political problems linked with it.

You're right, Rudolf - your last point is very important to ensure we influence this as far as we can. 

I would think , if robots replace people , good riddance (no offense) !!!  Machines have a reset button and if programmed and designed well can be less noisy . Efficient in terms of outputs and limited (no intrusion of any sort)!!!! 

No I do not want them to obey orders , yet want things done !!!

Since I come for academic background ,  I want to be with people , I want them to think and work like people , may be like robots at times ....

Dear Tony

In the long run, your question has to do with the role of robots (and artificial intelligence) in our everyday life, namely in our workplaces.

Given the continuous increasing in technology in many countries all over the world, we can say that day by day our world is becoming a predominantly technological world. Thus, it is more than natural that, as Vladimir  notes, robots come to replace humans in many workplaces. This being so, a question arises: To what extent the increasing role of robots in our everyday life is beneficial and/or detrimental to it?

As I see it, robots (and artificial intelligence) are a kind of a double sword. It is wonderful that robots can, for example, and as mentioned by Rudolf,  do those jobs that are physically exhausting, dangerous, unhealthy, boring, and the like. This is a great benefit for those who generally do such jobs, the poorest people in general. As we live in a global world, benefits for several people are benefits for all the mankind.  

Robots and artificial intelligence have also, as it were, their dark side.

First, they can give rise to a widespread and unwanted unemployment and, hence, to constitute a menace and a danger for one's right to work and earn, for example, the money we need to survive and have, say, a decent life.

Second, robots are programmed  to do certain tasks. As such, they are not capable of displaying creative and innovative behaviors, nor are they able to exhibit  creativity, originality or divergent thinking. In other words, they are not capable of going beyond the information/program that humans gave to hem. 

Thirdly and moral importantly, robots function according, say, a given grammar, but they not have no semantics at all. This means that robots are capable of intellectual intelligence, but not, for example, of social, moral, and emotional intelligence. Robots, like computers, are blind to semantic and meaning issues, even though they can be used in the clinic for patients entertainment, as Vladimir says,

To sum up, as intelligent machines, robots are welcome and appreciated to save time, do boring jobs, and free humans from unhealthy and  dangerous jobs. However, it would be a disaster to have, say, our lives totally dependent  upon robots. Fortunately, this would be impossible because, for instance, I do not know of no robot constructed by another robot. This also means  that artificial intelligence is only partly artificial for it only exists because of humans' capacities to generate  it.

Best regards, Orlando

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I like these responses - particularly the dark side - which need to be carefully thought through.

I remember one philosopher making the point that what was acceptable yesterday may be different to what is acceptable today. This constant changeability of what is right/wrong/indifferent.

Thank you for this stimulating thought.

@Aparna - your response makes me wonder whether you are a robot in disguise as a RG professional, or a RG professional as a robot! Thank you!

Smart grid-smart production-industry 4.0-avatar-skynet-terminator...(Joke) .

It is clear that robots need mankind. But. Robots need mankind?

Even in the short run, some professions will cease to exist, or at least being substantially redefined. What is interesting (and indeed scaring) is that this is true for intellectual jobs, such being a doctor.

In the long run, there will most likely not be any workplaces left. Whether this is a good or bad thing partly depends on whether we come up with a new economy, which distribute wealth to all those (all of us) who are unemployed. 

Mikhail - skynet is already here! And at the moment, robots need mankind, but in the longer term, maybe robots will find their own 'consciousness' where they will not necessarily need mankind. Terminator is a case in point. What about the cyborgs from Start Trek?

Mats also points to a point that technology can be intimately connected to the structuring of societies and indeed professions.

I am enjoying the thought experiment offered by the programme Humans (see links).

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/humans

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140924-the-greatest-myths-about-cyborgs

@Mats - did you have any thoughts about what form of economy might be?

My PhD is on machine ethics which I define as the project of making moral decisions in a Turing machine. The elephant in the room of this project is that the criteria of right and wrong and are matters of dispute even among humans. Some (Mill, Sidgwick, Singer) put utility at the centre of ethics, others duty (Kant, Ross, Korsgaard), others virtue (Aristotle, Confucius, Hursthouse), others contract or agreement (Hobbes, Rawls, Scanlon), others need (Wiggens, Reader), others care (Gilligan, Noddings). So a preliminary is resolving this problem. What makes an act right or wrong? 

The Three Laws of Asimov, with all due respect to their fame and entertainment value, just don't cut it. The First Law hits stalemate with the Switch trolley problem - do I injure one to save five or through inaction do I let five die instead of one? The Second Law is obviously useless. Human A says go North. Human B says go South. Who do I obey? 

That said, the broader notion of a "rule hierarchy" is sound but you need way more than three laws.

Basically, the standard of right and wrong amongst humans is the moral intuition of the normally socialized person fit for jury duty - the "reasonable person" of the common law, the famed "passenger on the Clapham Omnibus") as interpreted by the bench. Civil law jurisdictions have similar notions that enable right and wrong to be determined without having exhaustive rules that define what acts are right and wrong in every conceivable situation. The problem is that human moral intuition is an undocumented and uninspectable "black box" and the rules by which it decides what right and wrong are in every conceivable situation vary by individual and by culture and are opaque. 

Thus machine ethics is pretty hard! McDermott (2011) says "solving machine ethics requires solving the whole of AI and even that might not be enough."

As for human robot interaction (HRI) and how smooth this will be there is a ton of research going on. The field of HRI draws on psychology to better understand how the "black box" of human moral intuition and the feelings of offense and approval that go with it work. HRI researchers do experiments with humans and robots interacting to test hypotheses and gather data.

As for robots putting humans out of work. While the alarming figures (47% jobs vulnerable to automation in 20 - 30 years) cited in Frey and Osborne (2013) have been widely reported. Criticisms of the methodology and less alarming figures (9%) produced for the OECD have not (Arntz et al 2016).

Even if you grant the premise that in principle 100% of human jobs are vulnerable to automation (in say 50-100 years), the remedy will be a universal basic income or a redistribution of capital. Possibly the remedy will be protectionist measures on human jobs. If the dismal forecasts of Frey and Osborne are true, we will observe a gradual increase in technological unemployment and their will be time for corrective policy measures.