The_Future_of_Employment

easonably mature, enabled by the rapid development of sophisticated sensors
and lasers, significant challenges remain for more complex perception tasks,
such as identifying objects and their properties in a cluttered field of view. As
such, tasks that relate to an unstructured work environment can make jobs less
susceptible to computerisation. For example, most homes are unstructured, requiring
the identification of a plurality of irregular objects and containing many
cluttered spaces which inhibit the mobility of wheeled objects. Conversely, supermarkets,
factories, warehouses, airports and hospitals have been designed
for large wheeled objects, making it easier for robots to navigate in performing
non-routine manual tasks. Perception problems can, however, sometimes
be sidestepped by clever task design. For example, Kiva Systems, acquired by
Amazon.com in 2012, solved the problem of warehouse navigation by simply
placing bar-code stickers on the floor, informing robots of their precise location
(Guizzo, 2008).
The difficulty of perception has ramifications for manipulation tasks, and,
in particular, the handling of irregular objects, for which robots are yet to reach
human levels of aptitude. This has been evidenced in the development of robots
that interact with human objects and environments. While advances have been
made, solutions tend to be unreliable over the myriad small variations on a single
task, repeated thousands of times a day, that many applications require. A
related challenge is failure recovery – i.e. identifying and rectifying the mistakes
of the robot when it has, for example, dropped an object. Manipulation
is also limited by the difficulties of planning out the sequence of actions
required to move an object from one place to another. There are yet further
problems in designing manipulators that, like human limbs, are soft, have compliant
dynamics and provide useful tactile feedback. Most industrial manipulation
makes uses of workarounds to these challenges (Brown, et al., 2010),
but these approaches are nonetheless limited to a narrow range of tasks. The
main challenges to robotic computerisation, perception and manipulation, thus
largely remain and are unlikely to be fully resolved in the next decade or two
(Robotics-VO, 2013).
Creative intelligence tasks. The psychological processes underlying human
creativity are difficult to specify. According to Boden (2003), creativity is the
ability to come up with ideas or artifacts that are novel and valuable. Ideas, in a
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