Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/15/this-clumsy-worker-robot-is-ha.html
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Can a robot be your spirit animal?
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GPOY for me, definitely
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oh noes the ai will kill us all
If all that experience has taught me anything, it’s that the robot revolution would end quickly, because the robots would all break down or get stuck against walls. Robots never, ever work right.
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We can’t fire him, because its the owner’s um… “son”.
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This robot does an uncanny impression of me.
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There are, I am told, four types of work that humans do: skilled manual, unskilled manual, skilled cognitive and unskilled cognitive. Any given job has some proportion of each. When people say robots will take people’s jobs, we are expecting jobs that have high proportions of unskilled cognitive to go first (indeed humans in purely unskilled cognitive jobs are now absent in manufacturing industries, and rapidly disappearing elsewhere). The speed at which robots replace humans will then depend on those job’s relative proportion of skilled cognitive, skilled manual and unskilled manual in that order
The skilled cognitive category breaks down into two types: logical and emotional (eg dealing with tricky but predictable things like law vs unpredictable things like humans). Robots find the first a lot easier than the second.
So according to this theory, if you are an accountant, lawyer, doctor or even surgeon, the robots are coming for you faster than if you are web designer, social worker, office cleaner, handyman or collecting the trash. And the above video may support that idea.
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I am laughing at this robot, and then I think they’ll come for me some day…
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Where I work, that robot would be taken for a piss test.
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It’s funny. Of all the what-if posts, that one is one of the least insightful I’ve ever seen. No one in their right mind thinks we currently know how to build AI that threatens humanity. That is entirely not the point anyone who understands what they’re talking about means when they say they are worried about AI safety.
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Go Home Robot! You’re drunk.
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Go easy on the poor guy, it’s probably his first day on the job. I only hope I do half as well when I am finally given arms.
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This is like a cold opening to an episode of House.
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I like to think they’ve programmed it to say “Uh-oh! Spaghettios!” each time something goes wrong. And being a computer it’s able to layer them as its troubles mount so by the end you’re listening to a cacophony of the phrase.
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Or, say, "Thanks Obama!"
Please tell me that’s never going to get old…
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Shades of Robert Sheckley’s Ticket to Tranai: the main character’s job is dis-improving robots; people get annoyed by the robot’s clumsiness, destroy it with a well-placed kick, and then have to go out and buy a new one.
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Ah man, it’s not an official funny robot failing video unless they fall down at the end! This was perfect!
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Anyone who thinks that the law involves more “dealing with tricky but predictable things like law” and less dealing with “unpredictable things like humans” and decides to be a lawyer on that basis is going to be in for a stark shock.
I’m pretty sure the same applies for all the other professions you mention.
Not that that doesn’t mean the robots aren’t coming for us…
That robot would clearly do fine as a senior judge for example. 
Who knew they would come for the jobs of the physical comedians first…
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