The Incorporated Robot

Robotic Autonomy Versus Robotic Utility

Asimov gave us the “Robot” stories and his three laws. These laws, ideally suited to Robots that are autonomous, and not “owned” in any way, or bonded/paired to a person, function essentially as sentient citizens in their own right.

This points to a world where we assume that we would implant the robots with AI capable of sentience. But before that, robots will be much more of a tool to humanity, not quite capable of sentience, not quite fully autonomous. They will operate under a set of rules that are much more manual in nature, specifically used to focus on tasks and actions that do not operate as “robots at large”.

Economics of Robots

This being said, there are challenges that we face as humanoid robots come into the workforce. If robots flood the workforce, corporations will have less need for humans. When a company that shells Pecans for example, can simply hire an army of robots, they can become vastly more productive, and also pay them a fraction of a human being. This will take an already low paid job and make it impossible for humans to compete.

There could be a way however to offset this problem, if the robot manufacturers and government could come together to work on this problem. A single person, working “reasonable” hours in manual labor roles, is likely to work about 8 hours on average. In any given day, that means if you could simply extend their working to all three “shifts”, they could technically be three times more productive in a given day.

Now instead of selling robots directly to a company and letting the owner simply field 100 robots, and let go 100 employees, there is potentially another path. Lets assume perfect altruism for a moment on the part of the employer, employee, and government. In this hypothetical situation, the employer wants the employees to have the best possible life, and balances that with also being as productive as possible. They would like to maximize profits, while at the same time, not making humans miserable, or posing health issues for those humans. The employee, like the employer will have a significant amount of investment in the idea of profitability. They want to make the maximum amount of money for themselves, while still maintaining a lifestyle of their choosing. Having time for family, social engagements, and also to know they have done a good job so they can take pride in their work. The government in this instance only has an interest that the employer doesn’t damage the employee, either through work related abuse, under paying the employee, or causing the employee harm. The government also would define and maintain the legal and ethical structures under which the business and the employee create their contracts for work. Essentially ratifying the governance rules the corporation operates under.

A Balanced Approach to The Use of Robots in Business

When a business employees humanoid robots, the replacement of employees is probably at its closest one to one scenario. The use of large robotic tools like robotic arms, cranes, gantries, etc. should be considered outside of this suggested scenario. Those types of robots, are doing things beyond a single human being’s capacity, and should be an exception to this rule. The maintenance and operation of those robots has some level of the intent behind this suggestion already since you have to maintain and work with them.

This specifically would be where humans specifically at a one to one level, might be replaced by robots directly. Service industries like cooking, cleaning, food processing, personal care, materials manipulation, or any other area where we currently today sill must employ humans. In these instances, disruption of the workforce could have much higher impacts that could produce significant poverty if you simply eliminate workers wholesale.

Robotic Pairing

In the instance where humans may find themselves being replaced by robots directly, and where they have an interest in being employee, there is a possible scenario for a betterment of both the employers productivity, and the employees quality of life. The government comes into this simply to help build the framework where both of these can be optimized.

If robots were not sold directly to businesses to replace workers, but instead leased or sold to the employees working at that company, a new paradigm could come into play. If employees were given a robot, to replace themselves, they can then become responsible for the robot. They are responsible to do all of the manual training necessary to help make the robot productive. They own the robot, but the robot then becomes their hands in the working world.

Through a combination of tele operation, and training, they can then allow the robot to be employed for two or three shifts with the employer. This gives them the ability to make two or three times as much with the employer. The employer can assist the employee with the training regimen, and then maximize the productivity of the robot. The employee is responsible to keep the robot functional, up to date, cleaned, maintained, etc. This is the actual “job” of the employee.

So the business and the employee are now effectively partners, not so much employer and employee. As such, they can operate as a corporation of their own, and file taxes as a corporation. The tax structure could be much more simple, and from an investment standpoint, if you start off with 100 shares (split to grow or add shares), you could have a simple profitable breakdown. The revenues generated by the robot get paid as dividends to each share holder over the long term. The default breakdown can be as follows:

5% of shares go to the government, so that this becomes your “tax”.
5% goes to the robot manufacturer so they continue to develop and support it for parts and software upgrades.
5% can go to the employer. This is payback to the financing.
5% goes to a “repair and upgrade” fund, so the robot stays up to date.
80% goes to the owner.

You can argue, negotiate, or allocate these numbers in multiple ways, it certainly doesn’t have to be this mix.

Robots for Kids

Future generations could actually be assigned a robot at birth. This could become a totally different approach because now you have something where the robot and an AI agent become a partner to a child with certain responsibilities to that child.

The AI helps educate the child until adulthood, in the body of the robot. During the early years, the robot will help with certain child care aspects, helping parents with their child rearing duties. During this time, the robot can also be a teacher and mentor to the child, helping the child to explore interests, develop skills, and be challenged to achieve and become a responsible adult. This is done in concert with the parents input so that the child can maintain family bonds, traditions, and the social support families can provide.

As the child gets older, the AI agent will shift out of the robot body, and into something more like a PDA. The reason for this is to detach the emotional bonds from the robot, ensuring that culturally we don’t become dependent on a robot to be a social construct for adults. Then the AI shifts out of the robot, leaving it as a “worker” upon adulthood, and is then transferred to a human’s digital assistant.

In a circumstance like this, perhaps you have a different share holder breakdown, as now we can use the share dividends as a financial incentive for good parenting. In this instance, the breakdown could be more like this:

5% to the government
5% to the manufacturer of the AI and Robot
15% to the parents
75% to the child.

This breakdown incentivizes the government, manufacturer and parents to raise the child to be a responsible adult. If the child is not going to be responsible, they won’t return profits to their shareholders, so parents will not want to see that happen, any more than government, or the robot manufacturer.

In a situation like this, the child’s life decisions remain free to the individual, as long as they take responsibility over the robot at adulthood to be productive, essentially paying everyone that helped with their upbringing back. This may seem like a rather mercenary approach, but it also helps the parents have a “retirement” that isn’t on public subsistence, and incentivizes actually HAVING children, rather than being childless.

Adults Become Productive Citizens

Once the robot goes into “productivity mode”, it is no longer the child’s mentor, but the adult’s working hands. Then all profits from this work pay out to share holders as dividends for the “life” of the robot. The individual can choose to buy more robots, expanding the business once they are in productivity mode.

Individual aspiration in this scenario is for individuals to focus on their own “Gross Productivity”. Growth is based on the choice to reinvest the initial years of productivity, perhaps supplementing with the direct addition of the human’s hands to the work. If a robot in full productivity mode could work 24 hours a day, compared to a typical human at 8 hours a day, you now have individual productivity at 3 times a normal human. The human adding their own work to the mix could take that to 4x. That extra work and revenue could be invested to allow a person to buy more robots and grow into multiple fields of work, or maximize a single field of work. There are still and will always be undesirable jobs, like sanitation, and various types of care, and while it may not be a desirable job, it may be less undesirable if robots could be used to do that work.

This leaves individuals free to be as creative, productive, and achievement oriented as they like. The only requirement is to turn the robot over at an “adult” threshold to help support his or her self.

Later in life, the robot can actually be the caregiver to ensure people are not left with no care in their senior years. Since there is likely to be longer life in general, this would be valuable to society to remove the burdens on younger generations for care of their elders.

In addition, if there is a disability or other issue that prevents full adult transitioning to the “productivity mode”, the robot could effectively be part of long term care.

Bigger Picture

So how might this play out for humanity as a whole? By assigning people a robot early in life, it could create the highest possible level of education for individuals ever. It could also help ensure that people are not left behind in the future of the corporate world. Individuals can pursue the things they are most happy pursuing, and for work that may be undesirable, the robots help to make that less so.

But the real big picture is that humans remain central to the evolution of robots, AI, and our future of technology. By bonding an AI and a robot to a person, and not allowing robots or AI to be independent of a human, the doomsday scenarios of runaway AI and killer robots goes down dramatically. It would take an altruistic move by Robot manufacturers to make this happen, and even a change in government, to ensure that people don’t get dropped out of the equation.

It could be interesting to see a future amendment similar to the second amendment of the U.S. constitution related to robots. The “right to bear arms” might also have a “right to a robot corporation” ensuring that people remain the key mode of production in the world. This could limit the over use of robots that would cause economic disparity for humanity, and a way to ensure humanity stays engaged with self improvement, and being part of society in a productive way.

This doesn’t account for all the good and bad people do, that would remain a concern. But perhaps if the world creates greater opportunities for individuals the world over, the need for oppression and crime goes down. But lets face it, humanity seldom suffers Utopia, so this would have to be fleshed out much more to become any kind of reality.