The Robots are Coming.

In 1968 I attended the AFIPS Fall Joint Computing Conference in San Francisco. At some point I took the included tour to SRI where we were give a demonstration of an early version of what (I believe) became the Stanford Arm, which was "the first successful electrically-powered, computer-controlled robot arm". As I remember it, four or five small cubes (maybe 2 inches a side) were tossed on a table at random and then the robot arm somewhat shakily picked up each block in turn and stacked them one on top of each other. The demonstrator did mention that sometimes the computer did not get it quite right and the stack fell over. I thought, "I have seen the future".

Fast (?) forward to Stretch:

A Robot for the Worst Job in the Warehouse

https://spectrum.ieee.org/warehouse-robot

Quote:

All Stretch needs is to be shown the back of a trailer packed with boxes, and it’ll autonomously go to work, placing each box on a conveyor belt one by one until the trailer is empty. People are still there to make sure that everything goes smoothly, and they can step in if Stretch runs into something that it can’t handle, but their full-time job becomes robot supervision instead of lifting heavy boxes all day.

The robots are coming. The second age of automation is slowly transferring all human work to them. We'll soon have nothing left to do but live in our virtual reality worlds. Nirvana will have arrived. :jaw-dropp

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3sQrUUm