10 Ways Robots Will Change All Our Lives Forever
The way of the future, the way of the future, the way of the future.
Robotics and artificial intelligence are two of the most exciting and rapidly developing fields in technology at the moment.
Robots are already a big part of our lives and this trend looks set to continue almost indefinitely. Asking whether robots will change our lives could be a bit of a moot point, seeing as they already have, we're just used to the ones we already have. Nobody would even think of their toaster or kettle as a robot, but in a way they're an automated system designed to take the work out of an everyday task in the same way that a Roomba is.
So the real question is, what's next?
We all know that robots can put a car together on an assembly line, but as we develop more intelligent and even emotional robots, we might come to find that they are more and more a part of our day to day lives at work, at home and at play.
If you think about how much you rely on your smartphone nowadays, when 20 years ago it would have been a completely inconceivable bit of technological wizardry, it seems impossible to imagine what kind of hi-tech gadgets will become indispensable in the coming decades.
Could they soon drive our cars, cook our food, teach our children ... steal our jobs? Even become the object of our desires?
Robots are the future, we just don't quite know what it will look like yet.
10. Service Industry
As robots not only become more and more physically sophisticated, but more socially and emotionally intelligent, they will become more and more prevalent in situations that would usually require the human touch, such as customer service.
As it is, most phone calls to a business will be at least partially dealt with by an automated system. As personal information becomes more and more widely available on the internet (no matter how careful you are, you will have some kind of cyber footprint), customer facing robots may even be more useful than their human counterparts.
With just an internet connection, they will have all sorts of useful information about you and this is not just limited to you Facebook profile, but your browsing and purchase history, likes and dislikes, geographical location, occupation, and even your credit rating. Anything you have ever put into a web form or even anywhere you have been (remember that mobile devices often track location now), could feasibly end up attached to your online presence.
In slightly less unsettling news, there are already novelty robot cafes and restaurants in countries such as China and Japan (surprise surprise) in which robots take the place of waiters, waitresses and chefs and all ordering is digital. In the future they might even be able to predict what you would like to order.