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Hospital Robots

Posted by timothy on from the soon-it-will-seem-weird-to-notice dept.

bluegreenone writes: "The Washington Post has an article about hospital robots. The most interesting part was hearing the robot's 'co-workers' describe their relationship with him." Only slightly scary.

2 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Scary? by lameland · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How exactly is this scary? It's a robot that can deliver medication from a pharmacy to a nurse's station. The only remotely dangerous thing it does is drive down the halls. Its been programmed to avoid everything/one in the hallway, if that is not possible, it stops and announces that it can not make any futher progress without assistance.

    Sounds pretty safe to me.

  2. Re:Overcomplication by 3-State+Bit · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You said (emphasis here and below is mine):
    The Tobor system would cause more problems than it solves by throwing a very complex solution at a very simple problem.
    Better to pay a trained human     to do the running or introduce it as part of a Medical degree.

    I just about wet myself reading this, as it is an almost thought-for-thought transcription of this anecdote regarding John von Neumann (I trust you've heard of him):
    In the 1950's von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept; John Backus remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more than machine language?" Frank Beckman, who was also present, recalled that von Neumann dismissed the whole development as "but an application of the idea of Turing's `short code'." Donald Gillies, one of von Neumann's students at Princeton, and later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in the mid-1970's that the graduates students were being "used" to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine (probably the IAS machine). He took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about he was very angry, saying (paraphrased), "It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work."

    source

    Now think ahead 20 years.