Austin Peay Extras | AI and the Robot Revolution
[Music] Hi everyone this is Grayson Nicholson the host of the Austin Peay Experience Podcast. Welcome to the Austin Peay Extras, the podcast Series where we share the fascinating talks and lectures hosted by the university each semester. We're back with the most recent Science On Tap featuring Jody Alberd assistant professor of engineering technology presenting his talk, "The robot Revolution: Navigating AI Automation and the Workforce of tomorrow." Enjoy! All right welcome everybody to Science on Tap our October 3rd Edition. Thank you so much for coming tonight my name is Karen Meisch, I'm the dean of the College of science technology engineering and Mathematics, College of stem and of course our purpose tonight as with every Science on Tap is to try and help the community understand a little bit about certain topics uh in stem and so tonight's topic is going to be very interesting and and wonderful uh given by Professor Jody Alberd from engineering technology I'm going to let him uh introduce it and then uh as always you'll find that there are comment cards on each of your tables and so please make sure you fill those out not only is that a great way for us to generate more ideas about the topics we can cover on science on tap but it's also how we can actually draw our prize uh for the end of the science on tap talk. At the end of The Talk today we'll also be having a really fun reveal
of the name of our robot dog that you might have seen uh walking around earlier tonight uh and so we'll do that at the end of The Talk and of course I was trying to give a plug for next month's talk so no November 7th is next month's talk which is 11 election day uh and so uh how Democratic is our democracy the map behind politics uh so given that it's election day we thought it might be a good time to delve into some of the math uh behind politics for next month all right and without any further Ado I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Professor Albert hey all right thanks everybody for coming out I am uh my name is Jody Albert I'm a faculty member at Austin PE State University in the department of uh engineering technology it's part of the College of stem uh I am originally a manufacturing engineer by trade uh I've worked in a lot of the regional industries from Electrolux to Train Commercial insulating glass out in cumland city and mssc and Hopkinsville so I have uh a deep interest in technology specifically uh in manufacturing I got to hold it really close okay I'll try to be a loud talker and I'll try to remember to keep this up if I tend to drop my hands as I do in class just give me a quick reminder so without further Ado uh in 1976 I was 6 years old and I was standing in line at the Capri twin theater here in Clarksville and I was waiting for a movie to come out that I had never heard of called Star Wars and by the end of this movie I was fascinated and I was uh Enchanted by the star of the movie the protagonist the hero R2-D2 now you couldn't convince me that R2D2 was not the hero of this story uh everything happened because of R2D2 Luke Skywalker would still be a moisture farmer hanging out at tshi station with his friends but I was enchanted with technology at that point SciFi began to hold an interest and as I grew through my life uh sci-fi continued to hold my interest with television shows such as Star Trek the Next Generation and other movies that came along during that time and I began to develop a deep love for technology because in every utopian vision of the future we accomplish great things alongside technology and As I Grew into adulthood I began to see some of these things that I saw in technology actually coming into fruition all of a sudden we had computers that we could interact with by talking to uh we were able to communicate with each other over vast distances we had Computing technology in the palm of our hands that had access to Limitless information and I was excited about the future and what all this technology was going to hold for us and I was looking forward to such great things that technology promis but as I contined to see these things become more common in our everyday lives I began to notice that there was a reluctance a hesitancy and sometimes even a fear of what this technology meant for the future and as I saw this happening I began to ask myself what happened when did we all of a sudden start dreading a future alongside Tech technology when did we stop embracing the excitement and the promise that it held now that's a very complex topic and it has a lot of aspects but I want to focus on one tonight and that's how is this going to affect us in the workplace how is this going to affect our future and our jobs further down the line so tonight's talk is the robotic Revolution navigating AI Automation and the workforce of tomorrow now it would be appropriate to start this off with the just addressing the elephant in the room what are our concerns what are our doubts that we have about technology and when we label concerns and doubts they take two very different characteristics under our concerns we may ask questions such as will a robot take my job how is this going to affect the economy what about about my data and my privacy what about my ability to make decisions for myself in the future and most importantly is it going to be safe now on the other Spectrum we have doubts and these doubts are a little less tangible and a little more subjective we ask questions like and make statements such as I don't understand how it works maybe we are concerned with whether it's going to last is it going to be something that we need to even be concerned with is it going to be around tomorrow Google Glasses maybe we don't think that it's actually useful to us and we don't see the purpose of it or we don't think it's reliable and again we just have a hesitancy because of concerns about safety things that we can't necessarily quantify but we can articulate the truth is that none of these fears or concerns are unfounded but neither are they new these concerns have gone back over 200 years if we go back to the first Industrial Revolution which was occurring in the late 1700s and the early 1800s we saw the mechanization of the textile industry in Great Britain uh that's when they began taking jobs that had traditionally been done for Generations by manual labor and converting them into machine processes and that's when we saw the rise of a group called The Lites the Lites were a 19th century movement of English workers and they were opposed to the mechanization in the textile industry and they began they took their name after a figure of folklore called Ned lud and much like Paul bunan or Johnny app seed Ned lud was believed to be B based on a real person he was actually uh someone who had sabotaged industrial equipment and they saw him as a symbol of their movement so they began to engage in industrial sabotage they began breaking the machines that were taking their jobs or that they saw as a threat to their future employment and this led to uh legislation and more importantly in the in 1918 or 1812 the frame breaking Act and this made that the destruction of industrial equipment a capital offense leites who were punished under this act were actually subject to penal deportation and even the death penalty uh approximately 60 to 70 leites were hanged over a 2-year period for destroying and sabotaging Industrial Equipment this was a significant impact on the gross national product of Great Britain at the time and today we use this to describe some someone who is opposed or resistant to new technology now over that 2-year period the Lite movement began to fall out of favor and it began to fade out but the concerns and the fears and the doubts continued and persisted even into the Modern Age we now have what we refer to as neoism neoism is a leaderless movement opposing many forms of modern technology and they do so for a variety of reasons whether it's for uh environmental reasons or concerns or for labor concerns or even ethical concerns and this brings us to the Lite fallacy the Lite fallacy is the mistaken belief that there is a finite amount of work available and If we have machines do all this work there won't be left for any of us to do and we we call this a fallacy because historically this just hasn't proven to be the case now there are many prominent neolites uh one of the most prominent was a math prodigy known as Dr Theodore kazinski Theodore kazinski better known as Ted kazinski or the unibomber uh in 1969 left his teaching position at UC Berkeley and adopted a livestock of avoiding and issuing technology he moved out into the woods and into a cabin where he had no running water no electricity and he began to send a series of explosive devices for over 20 years devices that killed and M several people so the tactics of neoism have taken anywhere from a just a peaceful protest to a more radical uh aggressive stance of it so are they right are they are the Tendencies of neoism incorrect well yes and no while it is true that machines can do work that was traditionally done by human labor the truth is that they typically do the easy work we have them do the things that are simple they require less skill less Talent NE less knowledge and that typically tends to be where machines come into play first the difficulty of that statement though comes in to the fact that what we Define as easy begins to get higher and higher as technology advances see there's a small window that goes above What machines can do that human workers have to do but then we reach a peak of what we can accomplish there's only so much Computing that we can do there's only so much information we can process at a given time the work that lies beyond what we can do as human beings uh requires us to turn back to technology now as technology advances that window does tend to get smaller and smaller what we looked at as easy work that we could easily automate starts taking up a greater amount of space another neolite self-described was Steven Hawkings and Steven Hawkings said that the means of production will be controlled by the machine owner class and Technology will create more economic equality so is he correct again we look back at history uh when we look at those who controlled oil production and those who controlled steel production yes there was a class that played into that technology that were able to control that technology so neoism does have a very real statement to make in that context but we need to look at it with a more open mind so we get to the question at hand will a robot take my job probably probably yes it it's not a popular statement to make but probably but the real statement is is it going to be a job that you don't want a robot to take in 2013 Oxford University completed a study and it suggested that 47% of jobs were at risk of being automated over the next 20 years so between 2013 and 2033 47% at risk of being automated and that's an alarming figure but it's really kind of a figure without context when we say that jobs are at high risk what kind of jobs are we talking about what kind of tasks more recent Studies have indicated that automation doesn't replace jobs automation replaces tasks and it's very important to understand that distinction we perform tasks in the performance of our job and while we may automate certain tasks within that job the idea that our job will be eliminated completely is part of that Lite fallacy in truth automation again doesn't replace jobs it replaces tasks and this frees workers up to perform other tasks other things that we can do things things that would be more productive more value added and we know this is true because we can simply look at something like the agriculture industry in the early 1900s the agriculture industry employed 41% of the nation's Workforce 41% of our nation's Workforce were engaged in the agriculture industry a century later only 1.9% from 42 41% to 1.9% and this number continues to drop as we continue to see advances in the agriculture industry this was brought about largely due to mechanization in the form of tractors and combines and machines that are able to do the work much faster and more efficiently than we could expect human workers to do that work and this has been driven also by our increase in demand as our population is grown we have an increased demand for agriculture it's predicted that robots will continue to assume tasks such as planting weeding and you and sorting out units using AI enabled cameras and that 1.9% is going to continue to drop so if we went in a century from 41% to 1.9% what happened to the unemployment why
have we not had 39% unemployment over the past Century because Automation in agriculture because automation replaces tasks it doesn't replace jobs those workers have found other opportunities and other avenues and we'll talk about some of those in just a few minutes now I said at the beginning that I'm a manufacturing engineer by trade so my area of Interest typically lies in the area specific to manufacturing so what about the role of Robotics and Manufacturing robots in manufacturing really hit a hit a surge in the 1970s even as a child growing up I was aware of the impact that robotics was taken in the automotive industry as well as the concerns that it began to present in 1969 the Stanford arm was developed with 6 degrees of freedom and that's typical to what we see in industrial robotics today this boom continued into the 1970s and today robots are essential in keeping Automotive plants competitive with over half of the industrial robot purchases in North America being made by automakers that automation has not necessarily driven large scale unemploy employment what it's done is kept the automotive industry competitive it's kept them functioning and able to meet the demands of an increasingly mobile Society uh but what about within our industrial environments and our facilities today forklift accidents there's not an industrial facility in the country that doesn't have forklifts we use them for Material Handling we use them for material positioning and there are millions of forklifts Across America in industrial environments but they result in 34,900 injuries and almost 62,000 non-serious injuries every year uh when you look at a safety environmental safety and health department of most manufacturing facilities one of the areas of concern is forklift operations because they're entirely based on human interaction we have human forklift drivers we have human people walking around a facility and these accidents are driven by any number of factors whether it's driver fatigue worker complacency not looking when they step out into a traffic path so these safety concerns are definitely something to be worried about but OSHA estimates that 70% were preventable and that they were based on human error now a lot of facilities have begun turning to automated guided vehicles for Material Handling these automated guided vehicles or AGS are a $ 1.31 billion market and it's expected to double in the next 5 years right now facilities such as Amazon Amazon is one of the largest users of agvs so much so that the company they were buying all of their robots from they just bought the company and now it's Amazon robotics it it made sense 520,000 automated guided vehicles in Amazon plants across the country that's more than all other Industries combined but more facilities are seeing the value of replacing their forklift fleets with Auto guided vehicles in terms of safety to workers in terms of safety to material and safety to the facilities so there are tradeoffs they're slower about 50% but they've proven to be safer and more consistent they're not as versatile so do I expect that forklift drivers are going to become OB obsolete over the next 5 years as we double that industry no probably not forklift drivers still have a role to play in our manufacturing facilities forklifts are a lot more versatile they're able to perform and accomplish things that automated guided Vehicles just can't do they don't have the the agility they don't have the uh ability to to be versa in that environment so I do think that we're going to continue to see forklifts but the average life of a forklift is about 20 years depending on the model and the maker so 20 years for a forklift and I think as we begin to see these forklift fleets start to age out rather than replace those forklifts I think what we're going to see is companies begin to turn more and more to automated guided vehicles to solve their Material Handling Solutions so what we're seeing in industry is that the role of robots is evolving we're going from a high volume Automotive only technology to something where now we're asking where can we put a robot where can a robot fill a need where does it add value to our Enterprise now currently the manufacturing industry employs about 11% of the US Workforce 11% one in every 10 workers is employed in a manufacturing facility somewhere in the US this is an actual decline over the last 5 years of about 1.4% as more jobs become automated we're noting a decline but the question that we really need to ask is has this increased automation driven the decline in labor or has the decline in labor driven the increase in automation it could be 50/50 my experience is that we're facing a labor shortage most manufacturing facilities are competing for labor in their facilities and are competing with with other facilities in their region does anybody know what the starting pay at a manufacturing facility for someone coming off the street with no skills or qualifications whatsoever prior to or prior experience is going at right now 20 to 21 an hour when I left Electrolux two years three years ago it was between 20 and $21 an hour and that was because all of the other facilities in that area had started hiring at 19 and 20 and it's not because they can't find people who are willing to work there are a ton of people willing to work but for whatever reason or choices we have a shortage in our labor pool if we need a 100 people in a facility and we can only hire 80 people what do we do about the other 20 jobs I can only get 80 I've offered as much money as I could possibly offer and I still can't get the workers in the door well the answer is we have to automate those 20 jobs that we can't fill so is the decline in labor driv driving the increase of automation I would say yes as our demands increase as we begin consuming more it's going to continue to to drive increases in a necessity for automation uh despite economic factors we consume now more and we have a greater demand for manufacturing than we have ever had at any point in our history so manufacturing increases the demand increases our need for tasks to be performed increases but our labor rates are kind of remaining the same so automation helps us fill those gaps but what do we automate what jobs should we automate first whether are the jobs nobody wants to do in robotics we call it the 4ds the dirty dull difficult and dangerous these are the jobs nobody wants to do in the first place you can't pay me enough to do a dirty job okay maybe you could pay me enough but not enough that makes it economically feasible dirty jobs painting pain train in is a dirty job dull jobs monotonous repetitive jobs at LG there's somebody getting paid $20 an hour to shoot screws in a dishwasher over and over and over again and it's a boring manous job and it has its own ergonomic challenges as well difficult jobs jobs that are just too hard for us to do or too complex perhaps we just can't keep up with the pace needed to meet the demand we can't just tell workers work faster that's really not an answer so we automate and jobs that are dangerous jobs working in dangerous environments that are hazardous to our workers why put people at risk when I can just automate that job and make it safer for everyone now we speak of these in terms of Robotics but this applies to any implementation of automation if we're going to automate this is the first area we look for what are the 20 jobs out of a 100 I cannot find anybody to fill because it's a dirty dull difficult or dangerous job so what are the results of this increased automation well first is job displacement and some sectors you're just going to see robots and automation replace these tasks that are dull dirty difficulty and dangerous but you're also going to see job creation deployment of automation historically has resulted in a net job increase that's right automation is a net job Creator these jobs typically revolve around other Associated functions necessary to support automation maintenance and operation ations the development Innovation and the implementation and integration of automation systems and sometimes it's entirely new industries that are created I had a conversation with a gentleman before we started tonight and we discussed about you know a 100 years ago my grandparents could not fathom or conceive of the jobs that would be available to us today and I Can Only Imagine what type of jobs and new Industries are going to be created a 100 years from now job transformation in many cases automation just transforms a job rather than eliminating them one of the examples I like to give is I was automating a process when I worked at a manufacturing facility and I had an operator who had worked on that process for 10 years they were super proficient at this job they were very good at it but it was a very labor intensive job so when we automated that I needed an operator who could watch and observe and monitor that automation who better than the person who had been doing it for so long who could note any variations in the process any errors or mistakes in the automation equipment who better than the operator that had been doing it by hand to now monitor the automation doing the job and that's what we did we began transforming that job from one of manually performing a task to monitoring the automation that was performing that same task and as a result we ended up with an operator who was able to give better feedback was able to uh notice much earlier in the process when the system was failing and we had a stronger process in the end a lot of times these tasks require more problem solving creating creativity and human judgment and that's where our operators really Excel doing the D dirty difficult and dangerous jobs are not where our operators Excel they excel in being able to use their own creativity and problem solving some times there's industry specific impact has anybody been to the noodle place they got the robot that comes around and serves your food to you what's the name of that I I I'm not going to say because I don't I don't want to compete with strawberry alley I do love their food here but uh I have not been I had a student who was bringing that up to me that there's a noodle place that has a robot server come around to your table certain industries are all already shifting into automation they're finding these jobs that in the food service industry for example now there's these self-served kios where you can just order your own food the food service industry has a huge labor shortage so they're automating the jobs and why are they automating them well they can't find people to do the jobs but we still want our Burgers and Fries we still want to go through the drive-thru and have our order taken we still expect that service so certain industries are seeing this impact sooner than others whereas some industries that require that creativity that emotional intelligence and the decision making are less likely to be automated soon but eventually we're getting there sometimes they complimentary roles automation Technologies are designed to complement human workers we have what's called cobots or collaborative robots and these are robots that are designed to work with a worker the robot will pick up the materials that may be too heavy for the worker to manipulate or ergonomically unsafe for them to manipulate and it'll present the work to the worker who can then perform a complex task on that work and we're seeing that more and more in Industry collaborative robots are safer they're more able to be integrated and they work better with complex tasks that still require human intervention but would benefit from automation economic and social factors the broader economic and social context also plays a role the government will continue to make policies labor unions will still have a voice and the labor market and Society impacts are still going to have to be a factor that we consider and and how it's going to affect our employment in the future to mitigate this though we turn towards reskilling and education upskilling workers to prepare them for new roles that align with the changing job landscape as I said at the beginning I teach engineering technology along with my friends Matt and Mahesh we see a large number of students coming through Who currently work in an industrial environment but want to upskill they see the value that automation is bringing they see the impending increase in Automation and they want to get ahead of that curb so they begin upskilling and training and education and sometimes employers do that themselves as well and support that what about that question is it safe self-driving vehicles have become a Hot Topic lately we see it on the news quite frequently uh this is the weimo according to all state a typical driver goes 165,000 mil before an accident on average the number of driving we the amount of driving we do in the US 165,000 miles weo which if you never heard of whmo you might recognize it as the Google self-driving car they actually branched off into their own subsidiary and they're running what is a self-driving Uber service they're being marketed or tested in Arizona and San Francisco and for many years they drove with a safety driver behind the wheel but now they're completely autonomous uh Teslas Teslas are not self-driving Teslas have an autopilot feature that is not a self-driving feature teacher um Tesla is a Class 2 and wh MO is a class 4 in terms of Automation in 1 million Rider only miles with no driver or human interaction whatsoever they've only logged two two collisions that required reporting to the National Highway Traffic Safety adviser 55% of the non-reportable accidents involved D human drivers hitting a stationary vehicle uh and in almost every case uh human drivers violated Road Rules or behaved Dangerously in every vehicle to vehicle event their safety record is amazing so we have concerns about the safety but the data and the statistics show us that they have a very good safety record and they've had no reported injuries in 1 million rer only miles uhoh I lost two TVs there we go what about tractor trailers my father was a tractor trailer driver for 10 years trucks account for 4% of the vehicles on the road but they're involved in 9% of the fatal crashes huh he's on the wrong side of the road he is he is on the wrong side of the road I didn't notice that now this is actually a driverless vehicle that's being tested so it is on a test track or I flipped the image one of the two so would self-driving in vehicles improve that safety record if we began looking towards the mechanization or the automation of our truck driving industry which we rely on heavily would that improve that safety record uh the data and the statistics point to yes is that a likelihood probably not right away the implementation and the integration of the technology is significant the cost would be a very significant but truck drivers are already taking note of it and beginning to look at ways they can upskill as well and again truck driving also is being affected by that labor demand they're also being affected by that struggle to find people that are willing to drive so is Automation in the trucking industry inevitable at some point I would say yes yes it is inevitable will it happen tomorrow or in the next 5 10 years probably not but it is inevitable and our Workforce has got to start looking and preparing for it what about chat GP and artificial intelligence that's really hit the news lately I I like this Photograph because I'm a big admirer of his Holiness Pope Francis and I know in my heart of hearts that he would never wear an outfit like this but the photograph is so good that I had to double check it just looks so real and it's actually an AI generated image that went viral a while back and Chad GPT is a language learning model and you can read I actually generated this slide from chat GPT which I thought was pretty awesome because they did a great job of describing it I don't know that I could have described it as well it takes a large data set of text and it's able to take an input and provide an output that at this point is almost indistinguishable from human interaction and that's generated concerns I just it's scary it's a concern because how do you know if you're actually communicating with a human or automation now Chad GPT is just one model there actually uh I checked there's I saw at least three dozen language learning models that are currently available and more are being developed uh incrementally the wga the writer Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild are currently on strike because they're protesting the use of AI on the basis that it supplants creative artists and writers the intro credits to Marvel secret Invasion were AI generated by Method Studios now their concept artists from Marvel Studios commented on this secret invasion is AI generated I'm devastated I believe AI to be unethical dangerous and designed solely to eliminate career artists and that concerns me because of two words I believe no quantifiable evidence but just I believe I think Mr Simpson is just looking at it from the wrong angle so is it unethical dangerous and is it design to eliminate artist careers nothing could be further from the truth it's simply technology technology is developed with the intent of helping people are they unethical by using Source material without attribution well that comes back to the user how is the user using that technology and does it replace creativity or can it support more complex creativity well the answer to that is in the strike itself the wga and sag strike stes have set the movie and television industry back significantly and they've estimated that it's going to take a significant amount of effort to get their Productions back on track oddly enough the same thing that was a concern might actually be the solution the solution being suggested is using these AI generative tools as a supplement to the current creative Endeavors being put forth to help get it back on track that it can assist writers and it can assist artist uh none of these things even the secret Invasion intro are completely done in a vacuum they do require artist interaction and Method Studios has stated that they've actually seen an increase in their Workforce because they needed more people in order to generate that introduction so again it's created jobs jobs rather than replace jobs ultimately AI integration much like CGI has a greater value as a tool to augment the current workers than to supplant them it has the ability to create opportunities for increased productivity without putting excess pressure on workers simply telling them to work harder and faster is not going to be the good answer we can use it to streamline data processing and customer service everybody's gotten those phone calls about your car's extended warranty go ahead and update that before you break down but we get the calls we don't like the robo calls we've called for customer service and we've got the AI generated customer service please State the nature of your problem but ultimately it helps us streamline those Services it helps with software coding because while it can generate certain lines of code it is not perfect by any means and it still requires human interaction to touch it up it can help with marketing design in so many other areas one of the areas I ask is in education how can I encourage AI integration while maintaining creativity and computer science actually had the answer to that so during the most recent Innovation experience that we do in the College of stem every April uh one of the student projects in the computer science department was developing a computer a card game application uh that I was very impressed with and they stated to me that one of their biggest challenges was they're not artists they don't create artwork they're programmers and they had created this game but they needed a lot of artwork so they used an AI generative program to create the artwork for their game because ultimately it was a programming project and as a result they were able to complete their project in time so in my opinion we began instead of worrying about chat GPT taking away student creativity we look at opportunities to increase student creativity we look at ways in which we can encourage them to use AI generative programs to help increase the quality of their end product uh in engineering technology we're not writers we're not creative we work with technology so when my students have to communicate not so creative they communicate well in technical terms but maybe I need them to communicate in layman's terms this is where AI gener generative AI can help out so what do I do if a robot takes my job well in the US we begun embracing a technology or a concept known as kaizan or change for the good this overall philosophy Embraces reduction in waste and workers aren't seen as a waste but they're seen as a resource and that by investing in that resource and that concept of value added we get a better trained Workforce that is more reliable more productive and overall a general happier workplace relying on new employees to come in with the required training that we need for this incre in Reed automation is not going to be sustainable not in the competitive labor market that we have historically I've said that technology has resulted in being a net job Creator in many Industries there's a likelihood of a lateral conversion to a new and better job and implementation of new technology takes time it requires us to allow workers to acclimate and prepare for new roles where we're already being acclimated to technology if you've checked out of a grocery store or a department store recently you've gone through a self checkout or seen the self checkouts available that's acclimating us to a time when we don't even have to check out we just have rfids on our products we select them from the shelves and we walk out we're beginning to acclimate to new technology and resistance to that change is certainly a concern many times jobs require retraining and in Tennessee we have a lot of programs designed to help support that we have Tennessee promise and Tennessee assure or Tennessee reconnect which helps uh students out of high school as well as adult Learners get some of that retraining that I talked about a lot of employers provide tuition assistance for their employees to be able to go or tuition re imbursement programs for them to be able to go and get those up skills that they need in order to be competitive in a labor workforce many offer in-house training and Tennessee even has worker training grants that are provided to employers to incentivize them hiring lower skilled workers and training them up overall the net impact of Automation in the workplace is going to depend on how the businesses government and Society embrace it how do we adapt to these changes how do we invest in education and Workforce Development to help us upskill and prepare our workers for the increased Automation in the workplace and beginning to Foster innovation in emerging Industries the future will involve continued advances in technology history has shown that you can't UNC that bottle technology is going to continue to advance but it's our human capacity to utilize these advances to our greatest potential that will dictate what the future looks like so overall I like technology I think it's positive and I think we have reluctance and concerns and we address those but we can't ignore it cuz it's still going to happen but if we ignore it we're not going to be prepared so that's my talk for today I appreciate you coming to hear it um don't forget we do have a solar a partial solar eclipse coming up on October 14th that's going to be happening I think around noon I think noon is the best time to see that are there any questions so when does a computer that is Computing become a computer that is doing Ai and I think not being a computer expert CU I'm engineering Tech but I think that computers when we Define it as artificial intelligence is when it is able to exhibit that creativity now a lot of times we throw the term AI out there and we misuse it quite often but I think when we begin designing computers that can be completely creative you know a computer can't even generate a random number right right it's based off the clock so when we begin developing that and I think that's currently Beyond this but is that impossible for us to develop it seems like everything's going exponentially faster you know so I don't think that's far off is the US a major Center for manufacturing of robotic techology is is the US the major centor for the manufacturing of robotic technology have all those has all that stayed here or has it gone to another big country is the US a major Center for ma for manufacturing technology or robotics robotics for robotics technology uh us still has a significant presence but it does go into foreign markets Japan is a huge innovator in robotics particularly personal robotics so one day when I have my own R2 D2 unit that I dreamt about as a six-year-old it'll probably come from Japan but do we still have it yes companies like Amazon have invested so heavily in robotics that we are still one of the leading manufacturers we're not the places like ca comes from CA actually comes from Germany but was bought out by China uh fanic is us-based I believe so there's still a lot that is overseas but then again do can we really meet the demand for robotics with our current manufacturing probably not there's such a huge demand that we can't now when the self-driving car industry we are number one weo is the leader in self-driving car technology by far and that's us-based yes sir do I foresee a time when all the fast food restaurants will be completely automated no I think there will always be a demand for service industry but in terms of fast food I think we're going to see it change um the pandemic already saw a huge shift into drive-through service and takeout service and food delivery service so I think we'll still see it I think it'll look different though other questions I appreciate your interest in technology I appreciate your interest in stem uh h that is my wife do not take a comment card from [Music] her you're going to ruin my GPA all right let's give JY one more big round of applause
2023-10-14 01:28
