"general fix-all to the world's physical labors since at least the 1950's."
First, I'm not saying they're a "fix-all". I'm saying they're going to disrupt cost/benefit relations increasingly over the next few years. That's a much more defensible statement.
Second, part of the mental block that people are having with understanding this is that the promises that were made in the 1950s were premature, not wrong. Look at actual research coming out of robotics right now, not from the 1950s. It's still early, but there's been a qualitative change in the past couple of years; things are moving again. We got used to "nothing happening" so much so that it became just part of the mental background of our lives, but that doesn't make that rational.
There's nothing stopping people from being part of the delivery network, either. The most likely outcome is that it simply becomes an outgrowth of today's Fedex and UPS, starting in the cities and spreading out as the economics make sense. It's not even as much of a discontinuity as you might think, as from what I've seen of photos of the inside of the hubs, the hubs are already building-sized robots with small amounts of human help. It's just an expansion of the already-robotic-core of the delivery system, not an introduction of a brand new concept.
First, I'm not saying they're a "fix-all". I'm saying they're going to disrupt cost/benefit relations increasingly over the next few years. That's a much more defensible statement.
Second, part of the mental block that people are having with understanding this is that the promises that were made in the 1950s were premature, not wrong. Look at actual research coming out of robotics right now, not from the 1950s. It's still early, but there's been a qualitative change in the past couple of years; things are moving again. We got used to "nothing happening" so much so that it became just part of the mental background of our lives, but that doesn't make that rational.
There's nothing stopping people from being part of the delivery network, either. The most likely outcome is that it simply becomes an outgrowth of today's Fedex and UPS, starting in the cities and spreading out as the economics make sense. It's not even as much of a discontinuity as you might think, as from what I've seen of photos of the inside of the hubs, the hubs are already building-sized robots with small amounts of human help. It's just an expansion of the already-robotic-core of the delivery system, not an introduction of a brand new concept.