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Well, Arthur C. Clarke,

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a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s,

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said that, "We overestimate technology in the short term,

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and we underestimate it in the long term."

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And I think that's some of the fear that we see

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about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots.

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That we're overestimating the technology in the short term.

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But I am worried whether we're going to get the technology we need in the long term.

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Because the demographics are really going to leave us with lots of jobs that need doing

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and that we, our society, is going to have to be built on the shoulders of steel of robots in the future.

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So I'm scared we won't have enough robots.

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But fear of losing jobs to technology has been around for a long time.

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Back in 1957, there was a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie.

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So you know how it ended up,

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Spencer Tracy brought a computer, a mainframe computer of 1957, in

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to help the librarians.

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The librarians in the company would do things like answer for the executives,

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"What are the names of Santa's reindeer?"

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And they would look that up.

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And this mainframe computer was going to help them with that job.

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Well of course a mainframe computer in 1957 wasn't much use for that job.

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The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear.

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But that's not what happened in fact.

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The number of jobs for librarians increased for a long time after 1957.

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It wasn't until the Internet came into play,

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the web came into play and search engines came into play

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that the need for librarians went down.

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And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated

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the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today.

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And we can just ask: "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" and be told instantly --

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or anything else we want to ask.

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By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster

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than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period,

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because librarians became partners of computers.

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Computers became tools, and they got more tools that they could use

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and become more effective during that time.

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Same thing happened in offices.

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Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets.

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Spreadsheets were spread sheets of paper,

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and they calculated by hand.

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But here was an interesting thing that came along.

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With the revolution around 1980 of P.C.'s,

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the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers,

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not to replace office workers,

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but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers.

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So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets.

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It increased their capabilities.

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They no longer had to do the mundane computations,

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but they could do something much more.

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Now today, we're starting to see robots in our lives.

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On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot.

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When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan,

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instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick,

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as they used to do up until about 2002,

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they now send the robot out.

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So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs.

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On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh.

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These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S.

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And they take the dirty sheets down to the laundry.

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They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen.

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They bring the medicines up from the pharmacy.

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And it frees up the nurses and the nurse's aides

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from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around

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to spend more time with patients.

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In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways.

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But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid,

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because factory robots are dangerous to be around.

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In order to program them, you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions.

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And ordinary people can't interact with them.

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And I think it's the sort of technology that's gone wrong.

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It's displaced the worker from the technology.

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And I think we really have to look at technologies

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that ordinary workers can interact with.

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And so I want to tell you today about Baxter, which we've been talking about.

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And Baxter, I see, as a way -- a first wave of robot

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that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting.

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So Baxter is up here.

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This is Chris Harbert from Rethink Robotics.

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We've got a conveyor there.

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And if the lighting isn't too extreme --

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Ah, ah! There it is. It's picked up the object off the conveyor.

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It's going to come bring it over here and put it down.

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And then it'll go back, reach for another object.

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The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense.

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By the way, what's going on with the eyes?

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The eyes are on the screen there.

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The eyes look ahead where the robot's going to move.

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So a person that's interacting with the robot

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understands where it's going to reach and isn't surprised by its motions.

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Here Chris took the object out of its hand,

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and Baxter didn't go and try to put it down;

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it went back and realized it had to get another one.

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It's got a little bit of basic common sense, goes and picks the objects.

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And Baxter's safe to interact with.

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You wouldn't want to do this with a current industrial robot.

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But with Baxter it doesn't hurt.

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It feels the force, understands that Chris is there

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and doesn't push through him and hurt him.

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But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface.

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And so Chris is going to come and grab the other arm now.

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And when he grabs an arm, it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode

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and graphics come up on the screen.

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You can see some icons on the left of the screen there for what was about its right arm.

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He's going to put something in its hand, he's going to bring it over here,

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press a button and let go of that thing in the hand.

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And the robot figures out, ah, he must mean I want to put stuff down.

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It puts a little icon there.

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He comes over here, and he gets the fingers to grasp together,

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and the robot infers, ah, you want an object for me to pick up.

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That puts the green icon there.

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He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from.

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It just moves it around, and the robot figures out that was an area search.

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He didn't have to select that from a menu.

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And now he's going to go off and train the visual appearance of that object

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while we continue talking.

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So as we continue here,

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I want to tell you about what this is like in factories.

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These robots we're shipping every day.

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They go to factories around the country.

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This is Mildred.

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Mildred's a factory worker in Connecticut.

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She's worked on the line for over 20 years.

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One hour after she saw her first industrial robot,

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she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory.

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She decided she really liked robots.

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And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand.

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Now she's got the robot doing it.

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When we first went out to talk to people in factories

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about how we could get robots to interact with them better,

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one of the questions we asked them was,

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"Do you want your children to work in a factory?"

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The universal answer was "No, I want a better job than that for my children."

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And as a result of that, Mildred is very typical

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of today's factory workers in the U.S.

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They're older, and they're getting older and older.

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There aren't many young people coming into factory work.

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And as their tasks become more onerous on them,

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we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with,

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so that they can be part of the solution,

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so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S.

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And so our vision is that Mildred who's the line worker

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becomes Mildred the robot trainer.

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She lifts her game,

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like the office workers of the 1980's lifted their game of what they could do.

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We're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use.

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They're tools that they can just learn how to operate in a few minutes.

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There's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable.

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That's climate change and demographics.

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Demographics is really going to change our world.

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This is the percentage of adults who are working age.

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And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years.

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But over the next 40 years, it's going to change dramatically, even in China.

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The percentage of adults who are working age drops dramatically.

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And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast,

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as the baby boomers get to retirement age.

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That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars

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competing for services.

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But more than that, as we get older we get more frail

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and we can't do all the tasks we used to do.

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If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers,

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before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older.

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That's happening statistically right now.

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And as the number of people who are older, above retirement age and getting older, as they increase,

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there will be less people to take care of them.

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And I think we're really going to have to have robots to help us.

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And I don't mean robots in terms of companions.

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I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves

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but get harder as we get older.

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Getting the groceries in from the car, up the stairs, into the kitchen.

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Or even, as we get very much older,

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driving our cars to go visit people.

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And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older

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by having control of the robotic solution.

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So they don't have to rely on people that are getting scarcer to help them.

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And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time

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with robots like Baxter

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and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will --

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Here, Baxter, it's good.

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And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years

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as part of our everyday lives.

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Thanks very much.

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(Applause)