Robot-A Road to the Future for Mechanics

Recently, the success of ChatGPT has swept the whole media world. Major newspapers, websites, and we-media rushed to report it, and it’s impossible to tell whether this is the hope or the hype for a moment.

Anyway, the success of ChatGPT in searching, integrating information, and chatting with people is undeniable. As a wise man said, the interaction and communication abilities of ChatGPT, regardless of whether the provided information is correct or not, are comparable to a human’s raconteur.

The CEO of Microsoft, Mr. Satya Nadella, once commented profoundly: the success of ChatGPT originates from the behind NLP (Natural Language Processing) model and further reflects a persistent pursuit of human beings for hundreds of years, i.e., the process of abstracting, modeling, and systemizing existing human knowledge.

Such a wave indicates a revolutionary industrial era. Cyber intelligence will share responsibility for or even replace human intelligence. I can’t help reviewing the job at hand, whether it will be replaced by machines, become unimportant, or even be marginalized due to the world turning upside down.

Against this background, I gradually perceived another shining clue: the robot. Essentially, cyber intelligence is born and developed to realize a humanoid machine, i.e., the robot. Artificial intelligence and the robot are two sides of a coin, so to speak, which represent the thought and the shell of the humanoid machine, respectively.

The entity developed by these two aspects of technology will defeat human beings in partial or even most fields.

According to the inevitable law of industrial development, we can foresee that, in the future, robots will replace most jobs in factories.

Since the science of mechanics is essentially rooted in human’s passion for changing their fate, it is significantly affected or even determined by politics, industry, and economy.

So, what can we mechanics researchers do to realize a highly-automized factory and liberate human beings from heavy work？

As for AI, it seems that the science of mechanics can only provide a testing ground for approximating functions. On the other hand, in terms of the shell of robots, mechanics will construct the fundamental framework for realizing the complex motions. At the same time, the robotics research in mechanics hasn’t reached the “paying attention” level for now.

The so-called automatization, in practice, is the process of replacing human workers with electric machines. The most terrible part is that the replaced individuals typically lose their jobs and become unemployed. If this process proceeds slowly, the unemployed individuals caused by the development of techniques will be a small percentage, and our society can diagnose and control.

If this process is very violent, numerous unemployed occur, and the stability of society will encounter enormous challenges.

Unfortunately, the novel industrial revolution points to the latter consequence. We must think and plan to reply to the challenges of booming unemployment.

Immersed in such an industrial wave, the insight of the sage Weinar is as reverberate as thunder,

the name of a few reverberate like thunder

最近，ChatGPT的成功席卷了整个传媒界，各大报纸、网站、自媒体争相报道，一时之间让人无法分辨这到底是未来的希望还是博人眼球的炒作。

不管怎样，ChatGPT在搜索、整合信息以及与人聊天等方面的成功不可否认，曾有一位智者曾说过，ChatGPT的互动与交流能力（暂且不管信息对错与否）堪比人类的侃爷。

Microsoft的CEO, Satya Nadella先生曾对于此做出深刻的描述，ChatGPT的成功来源于背后的自然语言模型NLP，更进一步地说是体现了人类数百年来的一个执着的追求，即将现有的人类知识抽象化、模型化、以及体系化的过程。

这样的浪潮预示着一个革命性的工业时代的到来，赛博智能即将分担甚至取代人类智能。我不禁反观自己手头的工作，是否有可能被机械所代替，又或者因为世界发生天翻地覆的变化而变得不再重要，甚至边缘化。

在这样的思索中，我逐渐领悟到了另一条闪烁着的，时明时暗的线索——机器人。

实际上，赛博智能本身就是为了实现“仿人机器”，即机器人，而产生的。可以说，AI与Robot 本身就是一枚硬币的两面，分别代表了“仿人机器”的思想与躯干。这两方面技术发展所最终产生的实体，一定是能够在部分行为领域，甚至绝大多数领域碾压人类表现的。根据工业发展的必然规律，我们可以预见到在未来，工厂中的绝大多数工作，都将被机器人所取代。

Since the science of mechanics is essentially rooted in human’s passion for changing their fate, it is significantly affected or even determined by politics, industry, and economy.

在这样的背景下，我们需要做以下思想实验：为了实现高度自动化的工厂，解放人类劳动力，我们力学专业可以做什么？

对于AI，赛博智能方面，力学方面似乎除了为其提供函数逼近的试验场，而别无他用。然而，对于机器人的躯干方面，力学则将搭建其行为实现的基本框架。就目前来看，力学领域对机器人相关的研究远远没有达到重视的程度（软体机器人只能说是一个特例，对目前讨论的工业浪潮远达不到推波助澜的作用）。

所谓自动化过程，实际上就是将人类从业者，更换为机器的过程。被替换的绝大多数人类个体，其实是变成了失业状态。 如果该进程十分缓慢，那么短时间内因为技术发展而导致的失业人员占比较少，整体社会的调控机制是可以有效地消化的。 倘若该进程十分剧烈，那么在较短的时间内将形成大量的失业人员，社会的稳定性将受到极大的挑战。

不幸的是，现在所谓的工业浪潮形成的新一轮工业革命，正是指向上述结果的后者，我们也必须提前思考、规划，来有效地应对激增的失业人员所带来的社会治理的挑战。

在当下激烈的工业浪潮中，先哲维纳先生的预判如雷贯耳： 第一次工业革命是革“阴暗的魔鬼的磨坊”的命，人手由于和机械竞争而贬值…… 第二次工业革命便是人脑的贬值，至少较简单的、较常规的判断作用将要贬值…… 答案自然是要求建立一个以人的价值为基础而非以买卖为基础的社会。