Draft 2 of Thesis

 Title: Artificial Intelligence, Robots

According to an article by Scott McQueen (2019), Finland’s forests make up three-quarters of the country’s land. The Finnish Forest Centre is in charge of overseeing the conservation of this massive area and hence came up with an ambitious solution to use robots to autonomously execute most of the forest conservation tasks. 

Manual harvesting is definitely inefficient in the long run to meet up with demands and with the lack of manpower. There is a depletion lack of interest in forestry jobs due to the job being time-consuming and pretty dull since it is a lonely job. 

Firstly, the data used has to be precise and attainable before the Finnish Forest Centre can train the robots. They use aerial and lidar imagery to construct forest inventories, record tree measurements, and species information. All the data required by the robot is then placed in a geographic information system (GIS). 

The development director of the Finnish Forest Centre, Hamalainen, and his team see robots bringing benefits. People owning more than 65% of Finland’s forests can have simpler and more proactive management of their forests.

To produce precise data and decrease the amount of work in the field, the Finnish Forest Centre is using AI. By combining the data from GIS, imagery sources, climate and weather datasets, precise measurements of the forest can be obtained, and improve forest inventory predictions. It can also detect signs of spruce bark beetle attacks. Through AI, Hamalainen states that “we want the data to be so accurate that users can see and sell without having to go to the forest”. Currently, 85% of the cases have reliable data, while the remaining 15% is being improved.

The machine testing algorithms are being tested to extract the same measurements that were previously required in person inspection crews. AI can also provide the relevant information of the volume and species of wood without being present on the land which is costly and time-consuming.

Robots have indisputably empowered our world, their presence has made things more efficient and effective by contributing towards the agriculture, workforce and raising awareness in school. Robots have slowly immersed in our lives.

In The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation -  Darrell M. West mentioned how surprised he was when he found out that his personal assistant was an AI robot. According to  Darrell M. West, her performance was exemplary, extremely fast and efficient. This was because the prompt follow up in rescheduling task immediately after being assigned. The tasks include reading email, discerned intent and responding to relevant issues. Unlike humans, a robot is definitely focus, effective and efficient as tt does not get distracted by other tasks. Robots can function 24hours and can perform beyond working hours. This also helps to solve the issue of lack of manpower.

As the World's Population escalates, the demand for food and resources increases. The Plant Classification Robots have also empowered our world. Robots have dominated the agricultural sector by making the agricultural system more efficient and effective. It can reduce the ecological footprint of agricultural production to achieve sustainability. The system uses robots that can distinguish and locate the plants and weeds in the field and trigger the actuators to perform the treatment selectively without destroying the rest of the plant. These plant classification systems will enable agricultural ground robots for online in-field interventions and for aerial robots to perform accurate monitoring of the plantation on a large scale which will overcome the problem of manpower shortage and increase crop yield in a shorter period.

In Programming the mBot Robot in School, Gyula Mester made a very strong statement about how working with robots impact the student “ Working with the mentioned robot develops imagination and creativity, decision making skills, logical thinking, connecting different knowledge, also improves designing skills and empower children in different levels so they can improve their 21st century life skills ”. This explains that robots are a significant tool in educating the students or allowing them to explore the creativity within themselves. This is an efficient and effective way of educating the students by letting them explore and work on the robots.

Robots are slowly overtaking our daily tasks and they make a positive and huge impact in our lives. However, there are cons. With the presence of robots dominating human tasks, people may slowly feel the loss of meaning to life since they lose their jobs to robots as they need to compete. Fom an article ‘Are Wokers losing to Robots?’, Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu mentioned “The steady decline in the relative prices of robots and automation equipment over the past few decades have made it increasingly profitable to automate”. This shows that employees woud rather invest in robots or automation rather than in manpower.

In conclusion, humans should expand their knowledge so as to compete with their intelligence otherwise robots would overtake the world, and humans can be redundant. However, I do not refute the fact that robot helps increase efficiency and effectiveness in every aspect.

References:

1.Plant Classification Systems for Agricultural Robots (No. 1). (2021, March). Lottes, Philipp. https://bonndoc.ulb.uni-bonn.de/xmlui/handle/20.500.11811/8981

2.The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation (2nd ed.). (2018). Darell M. West. https://books.google.com.sg/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PeY2DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=robots+and+automation&ots=m1fpP_hiRP&sig=hGF380ouR3aRbT803kdQ2TNIm64&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=robots%20and%20automation&f=false

3. Programming the mBot Robot in School. (2019, December). Gyula Mester. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gyula-Mester/publication/337926235_Programming_the_mBot_Robot_in_School/links/5df661dea6fdcc28372455e3/Programming-the-mBot-Robot-in-School.pdf

4. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. (2019, October). Are workers losing to Robots? Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/el2019-25.