The Value Of Manual Labor In The World Of Work In The Future

A few months back, I went to a conference focused on the future of conversational interfaces. During this conference, one of the speakers described the current state of the art in cloud robotics, which is a very new field of study. Before the development of cloud robotics, machines had to be manually programmed and carried out their tasks independently. Because the intelligence that powered the robot was stored in the cloud, cloud robotics made it possible for robots to learn from one another. Whenever a connected robot made a discovery, the other robots in the group would immediately pick up on it and apply it to their own operations.

One of the illustrations that the researcher provided was a straightforward activity, which was to clear the table. You know, something that the vast majority of us humans are capable of doing once we reach the age of kindergarten. By the age of six, it is possible to teach a person how to go up to a table, recognize and hold glasses, plates, cutlery, placemats, and other things that are on the table, then place them in a bin without destroying any of the objects, and this is something that can be readily taught. They could even put them in the dishwasher if they wanted to.

This is not the case with robots. He explained how even a straightforward activity such as this would need an…