Artificial Intelligent Warehouse Robots That Learn On Their Own Could Be Interesting

By now must of us realize that our current jobs will be replaced by robots and/or artificial intelligence. Some of these systems will be better and more intelligent than humans, assuming of course humans are actually intelligent. These robots will work in our factories, agricultural sector, service and retail. They will work on Wall Street and Main Street and everywhere in the supply chain between. They will work in your home, drive your care, write your emails, blog posts, and do your tweets, so you may as well get used to going to the beach.

There was an interesting article on AI posted to the Fortune Magazine website on February 6, 2017 title: “How Powerful AI Technology Can Lead to Unforeseen Disasters,” by Jonathan Vanian which stated:

“Smaller decisions that robots make on their own can cause trouble because human programmers may fail to take all of a robot’s possible choices into account,” and “This is not the robot apocalypse, what we’re seeing here are robots pursuing human-generated goals in unconstrained ways,” and, “Having a basic understanding of ethics can help technologists better understand the potential ramifications of the AI-powered software and robotics they are creating, he explained.”

The professors of artificial intelligent robotics noted these challenges but didn’t go into the potential problems, after all many are not foreseen, however let me take a quick stab at it. Unrestrained robots giving merely goals to fulfill, such as grabbing something from the warehouse, and delivering it pre-packaged to the fulfillment center’s outgoing, truck load area or even onto the truck could get quite interesting.

What if the warehouse robots start fighting over jobs, attacking each other to be the robot that can deliver the item? What if the robots form gangs to guard areas of the warehouse from other robots then go to war with each other to fulfill the orders issued? What if they grab the products or materials from other robots damaging the products?

What if groups of robots block rows making the other robots go farther around running down their batteries, and then shut off the power to other robots being charged? What if they keep robots from the docking station or pull half charged robots away so their groups can charge instead? What if robots break other robots then put their parts into boxes to be shipped out – what happened to half of the robots, did they get downsized or right-sized?

Think all this is just too crazy to be believable? Many might agree, even artists think they cannot be replace, but one Google Search of artistic robots will give you an awakening. But, of course, as stated above not all will be perfect, there will be a crazy transition period, one which will prove critics right and technologists correct as well. We live in interesting times, so good luck on that.