Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Robot Successfully Hitchhikes Across Entire Length of Canada, Now On Way Back

Posted: 18 Aug 2014 07:07 PM PDT

Meet hitchBOT, a robot from Port Credit, Ontario.

HitchBOT Help explains Everything you always wanted to know about hitchBOT, but were afraid to ask.

HitchBot successfully hitchhiked from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia, a distance of about 4,000 miles. HitchBOT is now on a return trip.

CNN reports ...

The gender-neutral robot was conceived by university researchers David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller, who view its quest as part performance art, part social experiment.

"People seem to be rather intrigued with hitchBOT, and take very good care (of it)," said Smith, a communications and multimedia professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Zeller, a communications professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, in a statement e-mailed to CNN.

"We have even seen hitchBOT lying in a camping bed under a blanket, and sitting on a toilet," they said, "so people certainly have fun with it."

hitchBOT has a bucket for a torso, blue swimming-pool noodles for arms and legs and a smiling LED panel for a face, protected by a cake saver. It wears yellow gloves on its hands, and wellies -- rubber boots -- on its feet. Inside is a simple tablet PC and some components from Arduino, the open-source electronics platform. Together, all the parts cost about $1,000.

"We wanted to see what we can build on a shoestring budget ... and with tools/components that one can get in any hardware store," Smith and Zeller said.

Thanks to its computerized innards and speech software, hitchBOT can answer basic questions, make small talk and recite info from Wikipedia. It can also get pretty chatty, not always something you want in a road-trip companion.

"We knew that sometimes ... hitchBOT won't be able to properly understand what people are saying. For these cases, we came up with the solution to let hitchBOT simply chatter away," its creators said. "We taught hitchBOT to say that sometimes it gets a bit carried away, and that its programmers could only write that many scripts, hoping for people to be patient."

hitchBOT records its journey via GPS. It contains a camera and snaps random photos every half hour or so, which are moderated before being posted online to protect people's privacy. It also can record conversations with people it meets -- with their permission -- as a sort of audio diary.

Humans who encounter hitchBOT are directed to its website, where instructions tell them how to handle the robot (tip: drop it off at rest stops or gas stations instead of alone on busy highways).

Smith and Zeller say the goal of their project is to examine the relationship between humans and "smart" technologies while seeing whether an anthropomorphic robot can engender good will, cooperation and even affection.

Instagram Images

Instagram has some pictures of hitchBOT. Here are a couple of them.

Google Images

Google Search provides more images.

HitchBOT On Way Home

HitchBOT successfully completed the trip and is now on the way home as reported by Tech Times.

The kindly people of Canada have helped hitchBOT make it from the country's east coast to its western reaches and, so far, the hitchhiking robot hasn't been rerouted to an electronics supply store and scrapped for spare circuitry.
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HitchBOT has already traveled the roughly 60 hour, 6,227-kilometer from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia, and is on its way back home. The cross-country trip is a social experiment, of sorts, as the team behind the hitchhiking robot is seeking to study interactions between humans and artificial intelligence.

"I was conceived in Port Credit, Ontario," states hitchBOT. "My guardians are Dr. David Smith (McMaster University), and Dr. Frauke Zeller (Ryerson University). Growing up I was surrounded by bright, intelligent, and supportive people who I am proud to call my family. I have one sibling, kulturBOT, who travels from one art gallery to the next, tweeting photos of the artwork and of the venues."

The talkative robot has been offering to chat up drivers about topics such as astrophysics and philosophy and it is sharing its soul-searching journey on Instagram and Twitter. While hitchBOT is conversational, its English skills aren't perfect yet.

"After much thought and contemplation, I've come to realize that there is so much to experience beyond the boundaries of Toronto," stated hitchBOT before setting out. "Every time I think about all of the mountains and valleys, towns and inlets, and people and lifestyles that exist across Canada, I become increasingly excited -- and nervous at the same time -- about my hitchhiking journey across Canada."

Hitchbot vs. Bubble Headed Boobie

No offense to hitchBOT, but it looks rather like the "bubble headed booby" from Lost in Space.

Looks don't count. So congratulations to hitchBOT and the hitchBOT team!

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Rising Robots: Is it Obvious Robots Cost Human Jobs? Looking for Someone to Blame?

Posted: 18 Aug 2014 11:46 AM PDT

Technology Review has an interesting infographic on the Rising Use of Robots, and which sectors show the biggest increase in use.

I broke up the infographic into a series of smaller ones for purposes of discussion, adding red, blue, and purple colored boxes in the following chart.

Robot Usage Since 2009

In Europe, except Germany, robot usage is up and employment down.
In the US, South Korea, and Germany, robot usage is up and so is human employment.
In Japan robot usage and employment are both down.
Japan did not even benefit from a falling Yen.

This shows the relative increase in demand for US and Korean cars, and the relative lack of demand for Japanese cars and European cars other than German cars.

In the US, as long as cars sales remain strong, it appears auto jobs will stay. How long will that be?

Robot Usage by Sector

Note the robust use of robots in automotive and electronic. Contrast that with the three lowest usages of pharmaceuticals, food, and plastics.

Given the huge numbers of people employed in food industries, especially fast food, a growth area for food robotics seems relatively easy to spot.

Cost and performance of robots vs. cost of human labor is the key impediment to more robot use in food service.

Social concerns may also be at play. Do people prefer social interaction and the occasional bad server to a robot for whom you have to leave no tip?

Robot Sales

Robot sales are up, and so is job growth in the US. On a comparative basis, job growth in the eurozone, except for Germany is stagnant.

Point - Counterpoint

A comment to the infographic by Cathal Haughian caught my eye. Haughian commented "Those countries that have high minimum wages automate first. I had a tour of Mc Donald's newest Chicken factory, in China, this year. It employed a third of the workforce of a similar plant in the US. It's fully automated. Slaughters 5 million chickens per day. Robots the size of a two story house. Amazing. The Robot revolution will break the back of our economic system by 2020, I'd bet."

Technology Review editor replied "No it's actually more ambiguous than that, obviously: sometimes robots create entirely new jobs in new industries; sometimes they allow reallocation of labor to more productive uses; sometimes they sustain industries that would otherwise disappear. The truth is that no one knows whether we are witnessing a long-term restructuring of employment (in the sense that "full employment" may be a lower percentage of the population in industrialized nations) - and anyone who tells you otherwise is an ideologue on one side or another of this debate."

I side with the editor. Over the long haul, technology creates jobs. The problem being "over the long haul".

Why Robots?

It's obvious robots increase productivity.

But that is not the only force in play. The Fed (central banks in general) have cheapened the cost of money so much that some of the increase in use of robots is due entirely to cheap money.

Moreover, the push for rising minimum wages has done the same. Set the minimum wage at $20 per hour, and I bet you see far more robots, in far more places than you do today.

Looking for Someone to Blame?

Technology improvements are an inherently good thing. They lower prices, increase standards of living, and give us more free time.

Yet, if robot usage is artificially high thereby costing human jobs (and it likely is), blame the Fed for poor economic policy and blame Congress for poor fiscal policy. Don't blame the robots or the companies that use them.

Different This Time?

Some claim it's different this time, that robots are going to take your job no matter what it is.

Is it that simple?

For a robust discussion from multiple angles, including a couple of solutions, one of them grim, please see It's Different This Time: Humans Need Not Apply; Two Possible Solutions.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

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