Tech giant Alphabet is incorporating robots into its offices with the intention of providing basic and supplementary cleaning services.
There’s a corporate drone joke around here somewhere, but I’m going to respect my fellow office workers and leave it implied. At any rate, this sort of is what the 1980’s imagined the future to be. Robots and the like bustling about town, doing menial tasks and helping improve quality of life so humanity can kick back and do more important stuff. Then again, this also sounds like the start to what ends up being the Terminator or Matrix franchises, so what do I know? All I know is that automation has always been something that technology aspires towards, since all the way back when more primitive versions of ourselves figured out that wheels would move objects much more efficiently than we could.
Alphabet’s rather obvious goal with this entire project is to save money, of course. While it’s definitely spending money to give this new fleet of robots figurative lives, this amount will be more than compensated in the long run as personnel costs will no longer need to be accounted for. This new fleet has been conceived under the Everyday Robots Project which, as one could hazard a guess at, attempt to harness robotics and technology in the pursuit of completing everyday tasks with minimal human intervention in the process. This current slew of robots, called “general purpose learning robots”, have been implemented into specific offices of Alphabet’s numerous companies (Google and YouTube, to name a few). There’s currently a hundred of them, with more being implemented as feedback regarding their efficiency is provided.
Having a new-fangled piece of machinery for one’s convenience sounds very enticing on paper, but is something that often stumbles in execution. Such technology is often fraught with bugs, implementation issues, and often requires humans in the vicinity to adjust some form of their lifestyle in order to accommodate for them. Therefore, Alphabet’s 100 at a time strategy might honestly be the best way to start incorporating these machines. Then again, there’s another valid reason that people will not be happy with their implementation: jobs.
Jobs are already difficult to come by across the world, and while the post-pandemic situation is slightly better than the pre-pandemic one, surely Alphabet of all companies can afford to keep essential workers on its payroll and dispense with the robots? Then again, whoever pursued the march of technology with any intentions of stopping for a minute to consider ramifications?
Read next: Google is giving users the ability to delete their data from individual sites from settings, while removing the ability the to decline cookie collection
There’s a corporate drone joke around here somewhere, but I’m going to respect my fellow office workers and leave it implied. At any rate, this sort of is what the 1980’s imagined the future to be. Robots and the like bustling about town, doing menial tasks and helping improve quality of life so humanity can kick back and do more important stuff. Then again, this also sounds like the start to what ends up being the Terminator or Matrix franchises, so what do I know? All I know is that automation has always been something that technology aspires towards, since all the way back when more primitive versions of ourselves figured out that wheels would move objects much more efficiently than we could.
Alphabet’s rather obvious goal with this entire project is to save money, of course. While it’s definitely spending money to give this new fleet of robots figurative lives, this amount will be more than compensated in the long run as personnel costs will no longer need to be accounted for. This new fleet has been conceived under the Everyday Robots Project which, as one could hazard a guess at, attempt to harness robotics and technology in the pursuit of completing everyday tasks with minimal human intervention in the process. This current slew of robots, called “general purpose learning robots”, have been implemented into specific offices of Alphabet’s numerous companies (Google and YouTube, to name a few). There’s currently a hundred of them, with more being implemented as feedback regarding their efficiency is provided.
Having a new-fangled piece of machinery for one’s convenience sounds very enticing on paper, but is something that often stumbles in execution. Such technology is often fraught with bugs, implementation issues, and often requires humans in the vicinity to adjust some form of their lifestyle in order to accommodate for them. Therefore, Alphabet’s 100 at a time strategy might honestly be the best way to start incorporating these machines. Then again, there’s another valid reason that people will not be happy with their implementation: jobs.
Jobs are already difficult to come by across the world, and while the post-pandemic situation is slightly better than the pre-pandemic one, surely Alphabet of all companies can afford to keep essential workers on its payroll and dispense with the robots? Then again, whoever pursued the march of technology with any intentions of stopping for a minute to consider ramifications?
Read next: Google is giving users the ability to delete their data from individual sites from settings, while removing the ability the to decline cookie collection