ECONOGAL

While I enjoy rural life in a semi-remote area, travelling always brings technological surprises and it appears the robots are coming from what I saw on the latest trip. During a layover airport workout, I glimpsed for the first time automated wheelchairs.

I was rucking through the terminal when I first saw an individual being transported from a gate and it wasn’t too long before I spotted an empty one steadily rolling towards a gate with an incoming plane. They were equipped with a unique sound and blinking lights, but also with a very pleasant female voice politely asking those impeding their movement with a “Please step aside.”

Life in the boondocks certainly makes for discoveries when travelling.

Of course, flyover country witnesses’ technological advances as evidenced by last year’s post about the Vemeer SPX 25 trencher. While the machine still needed human help, it eliminated backbreaking manual labor to run new Internet line. However, travel really shows the large number of changes occurring in cities such as the first robot spotted a few years ago in Austin. Neither of these devices resembled Rosey from the old cartoon The Jetson’s.

What jobs will still be available for humans? If the robots can be fine-tuned to provide manual services such as pushing wheelchairs from point to point, what other tasks can be replaced?

Furthermore, the trencher was not programmed with voice protocols like the wheelchairs. One wonders how much and how soon communication between machines and humans will become standard. Will airport wheelchairs just have limited recordings? Or will the robots have answers like many chat bots? Will one be able to ask directions or other questions? Alexa comes to mind.

Just typing the first word prompted the second. AI is here to stay. So, I am starting to adapt. Recently, one of the offspring purchased a house and sent pictures of the back yard for landscaping ideas (and a commitment for physical help.) Using CoPilot, not Claude or any of the much-touted programs, I was able to come up with a plan complete with specific plants. Furthermore, the program provided a diagram. The drawing was not as fancy as one provided by a human landscape designer, but the cost was much less than the hundreds (or possibly more) a human would charge.

One can ask for specific answers or request suggested outcomes. Perhaps the second will allow the brain to continue growing. One fear is we will lose our thought processes including common sense. But my greatest fear revolves around intelligence. For now, these machines make plenty of mistakes, one’s humans can catch and acknowledge. But what happens when the robots are smarter than we are? Emotions, including compassion and even guilt, are what makes us human.