When I think of the word “robot” I think of a futuristic metal humanoid figure who can function just like a human and take over jobs. However, that reality is probably far off, or is it? I went to my schools after school robotics club to try and learn more about robotics and the future of robots.
When I got to the robotics room I was greeted by Mrs Norton who is the robotics teacher. Mrs Norton said that before being a teacher she was an electrical engineer . She chooses to run the robotics club because it gives kids a chance to work together, thinking, designing, programming robots and expanding the creative mind.
“It’s important for the students to have time to be creative and have no one to control how they think because the kids are the next think tank of the future,” Norton said. She wants to create a comfortable environment where everyone is respected and students can be creative and everyone can have their ideas heard.
However Mrs Norton is planning on retiring next year, which leaves the concern of who will take over robotics. The hope is for Mr. Guiren to take over the robotics club which has been running since 2006 so students can continue being creative and having that comfortable environment. But the future of the club is currently unknown.
During a recent meeting, the club watched a video that had the details of the next big competition coming up in january. After the video everyone went and started brainstorming ideas for the robots they wanted to build. The comfortable environment and everyone’s ideas were being considered and people were being creative and it matched exactly what Mrs Norton said.
When asked some of the team members what their favorite part of robotics was they said “Making robots and getting to control them in competitions,” said junior -Nathan Rettkowski , “The teamwork and competitions with restrictions and figuring out how to get around the restrictions with problem solving”- Peter Spiliotis, “The handiwork”-Luke aham, “the community built through problem solving and building the robots”- Aidan Cashman.
The next person I interviewed was one of the captains of the robotics team, Peter Spiliotis. We talked about the future of robotics and his thoughts. Peter said the purpose of robots is to create more efficient ways to do tasks. They will help people with jobs like creating parts on an assembly line or they will take over dangerous positions like police or military jobs. Companies are already developing robots to help with simple jobs such as amazon developing delivery drones
Peter says his concern is that delivery and factory jobs will be destroyed as robots are developed further. “The biggest problem is AI taking over programming jobs in the near future, maybe 5-10 years, currently they lack accuracy”. Peter believes that programming jobs could change to be more like supervising robots to make sure the code is working properly after the robots are programmed by ai but if they don’t programmers would also lose their job.
Peter concludes by saying that ”we probably don’t even know what’s next, people in the 90’s didn’t have any clue that this was the future”.
Me and Luke Aham (a veteran on the Triton robotics team), discussedwere talking about the future of robots. Luke said that robots are already being used by police to solve crime with stuff like police or military dogs. Drone warfare is another sign of robot development, with companies like Tesla and amazon working on things like tesla robots and drone delivery respectively.
The main reason robots are being developed is the demand for making life easier, and we see examples of this like alexa and roomba robots already doing that stuff.
I asked Luke when he thinks autonomous robots will become a reality, Aham and he said that they are still a way off, humanoid robots are still controlled by people. However Luke believes that within the next decade autonomous robots could be a reality.
Luke said that the role autonomous robots will play will be ones that are dangerous for us like police work, being in the military or construction work.
