www.willowgarage.com

In an article for the Huffington Post, Lights in the Tunnel author Martin Ford writes that Google's Cloud ROS (Robot Operating System) could soon put you out of work.

With ROS, Google is trying to create the MS-DOS (or MS Windows) of robotics. With ROS, software developers will be able to write code in the Java programming language and control robots in a standardized way - much in the same way that programmers writing applications for Windows or the Mac can access and control computer hardware.  Willow Garage is also involved in the creation of ROS.

"I think that many economists and others who dismiss the potential for robots and automation to dramatically impact the job market have not fully assimilated the implications of machine learning. Human workers need to be trained individually, and that is a very expensive, time-consuming and error-prone process. Machines are different: train just one and all the others acquire the knowledge. And as each machine improves, all the others benefit immediately."

Huffington Post