Tired of Doing Your Laundry? PR2 Robot Comes to the Rescue.

As a college student, a dream of mine has always been to not have to do laundry. It takes time out of my (fairly) busy day, and then I have to wait around the laundry room for close to two hours, preventing me from being my most productive. For decades having laundry done by robots has been a part of popular fiction, but now it appears that there might be a robot that could do my laundry for me, saving me time, and, most importantly, effort. In the article “Tired of Doing Your Laundry? PR2 Robot Comes to the Rescue” by Devin Coldewey, the author talks about how a new robot has been demonstrated that could potentially do most parts of laundry, even folding it! As the article points out it is currently unknown whether or not the robot could do things such as add fabric softener or pick up clothes of the floor, and it is very slow, it certainly seems that these feature could fairly easily be improved.. Hopefully the creators of this project, a group of roboticists from UC Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts, will be able to improve their design, and produce it in the mass market so I can finally accomplish my dream of not having to do laundry anymore.

While the laundry doing robot may seem fairly trivial at first glance, to me this article is very important because it shows that many mundane tasks such as doing laundry, folding clothes, cleaning, or doing the dishes will eventually be taken over by robots. This will mark a strong change in society as no longer will menial tasks be fulfilled by humans, which will greatly alter how certain jobs are perceived, how many jobs are available, and so on. One of the first things that comes to mind with this is that there will no longer be jobs such as maid, burger flipper, cashier, or shelf stocker. Instead, as robots become more and more advanced, these jobs will be taken over by robots which don’t have to be paid. It seems possible that there could be a possible future where there are close to zero “basic” jobs such as these as robots will be able to do them for a lower cost. This would definitely pose many problems, particularly for the lower class, and anyone who doesn’t have some sort of technical knowledge (trade school apprenticeship, college education, etc.). I personally know that many of my friends got their money through mowing lawns, working at grocery stores, or fast food restaurants, and without these jobs they would have had a very hard time finding any source of income as they only had a high school education. While I do think that robots that take over menial tasks is the way of the future, I feel that there will be a tremendous amount of problems associated with it, but I am very unsure of what the answer will be.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/tired-doing-your-laundry-pr2-robot-comes-rescue-n253086