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Why the US Consumer Doesn't Deserve A Decent Robot
SkinnyGuy writes "PC Magazine has up a lengthy look at how differing cultural approaches and expectations for robots are setting the stage for Amercian consumers to miss out on the best robots have to offer. The first paragraph is kind of funny:
'Someday the robots will rise up and kill us all. They'll record our lives, obliterate our privacy, set off nuclear war, and eventually turn on us and eat our brains. If any of this ever did happen, it would serve us right. We, at least American consumers, don't deserve the future that robots really have to offer.'"
This is going to make it increasingly difficult for me to take over the world! I want to know who to blame.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is the United States current president really a robot from the future?
HTTP/1.1 400
Sarah Connor blah blah
^^
The general public didn't care for the computer either, until it could do MSN.
PC Magazine has up a lengthy look at how differing cultural approaches and expectations for robots are setting the stage for Amercian consumers to miss out on the best robots have to offer.
Look, they have stairs in their houses, and we have stairs in our houses. What's so hard about this?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Asimov's First Law prevents that kind of threat. How can this happen ?
those on top have been saying that about their home help for millenia .... "the robots will rise up" is exactly what the romans were worried about ..... cue long line of Blender look-a-likes heading for the scrap heap saying "I am Sparticus"
Why would a robot want to eat our brains exactly?
Unless you're talking about ZOMBIE robots, in which case I'll have to update my Zombie Plan
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
I know this is slashdot, where technology is loved for the sake of technology, but seriously - are robots really that important? I guess I'm like the "average American consumer" in my disinterest in robots - be they androids or those little vaccum things. I'd rather do things myself, or have another human do it. Why? Because even dumb humans are going to be able to adapt more readily than the smartest robots we have today.
Would you want your house built by a robot that was programmed by someone who has never built a house but who read a book, or by someone who has been doing it for 20 years and can make adjustments as they are required to work within the actual, physical situation - not some theory from an architects' manual? Would you rather have your house cleaned by some cold, metal machine, or by some sexy, 20 year old, Russian girl?
Frankly, its just like the people who complain on here that calculators have made kids suck at math. if we start to rely on the machines all the time, then we're going to lose the skills ourselves. The pool of people that will be able to debug and improve the machines will shrink over time. Eventually, we'll be fucked - and not by that sexy, 20 year old, Russian housekeeper.
Domo...
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
...welcome our new robotic overlords!
-- Boycott Shell
...and just what was the point of that, exactly? I actually read TFA - guess I'm never getting those five minutes back.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
My dreams of a fully functional and cooperative Real Doll are ruined!
His point seems to be that Americans are threatened by robots with personality.
Back up the truck. American's recognize that personality is an unneeded and costly add on for robots. A roomba with a head and arms that walked around and vacuumed my house wouldn't threaten anything other than my banking account. The frisbee shaped roombas already cost too much. There is no way in hell I'm going to pay extra for personality.
Clue to the author:
Unless you are building a sex toy, giving a robot human (or animal) shape is expensive and pointless. Don't blame Americans for seeing through this.
Americans are going to get robots made at rock bottom prices with shoddy programming because people are too cheap to buy a quality model. Bloomingdales or Macys will have decent models, but Target and Wal Mart are going to have the crappy models.
I consider android-esque robots to be both fascinating and utterly terrifying. It's an impressive technology, and the uses for it are nigh endless. However, putting robots into the hands of the average american? America has been a DIY nation from the start, so it's feasable that the technically savvy/wealthy crazies out there would be able to modify or buy modified robots. They could make armed robots with a skin (ever seen those "real dolls"?)that could resemble a human from a distance or to a glancing eye, or who knows what else. I don't think they'll rise against us, I just don't want people to have them.
Problems with AI aside, I don't understand why anyone will want to create an intelligent machine that have the potential to surpass us humans, or worse, fail, and create a monster. We have read about robotic anti-aircraft guns going haywire and killing people. It is just plain evolutionary suicide. As cheesy as they sound, those sci-fi stories have some truth in them. For good or for evil, we are masters of this planet. Why jeopardise this position? Maybe, instead of creating robots of the Asimovian mold, we should place a limit on the potential intelligence of robots, maybe at most of an obedient dog.
This article is outdated. As a matter of fact one of they governor is a terminator from the future! :D
The entire article focuses around this point. The idea that robots will some day become common place. That we will have "robot repair centers" and the like(Although he never mentioned that in the article, he hints at this kind of common place usage in other countries). The simple fact of the matter is that even the "best level" consumer robotics are horribly unuseful. The only useful one is the vacuum robot.
I work with robotics as a hobby, and consider myself a little above a "novice" in applied robotics. The issue at hand today is not a technological one, is it an inspiritional one. Try and think of a useful robot.
Go ahead, do it.
What did you come up with? If you're like most people the idea of a robotic butler("Bring me a beer robot jeeves"), perhaps a robotic lawn mower, maybe even a robotic gaurd who patrols your house.
The problem is that all of these already exist in various forms.
Take for example the robotic butler. Lets say you are watching football and you want a beer. You would simply hit "beer" on your remote and the little robot would wander off. Lets say it takes him 45 seconds to get it and bring it over. You can do it in 15. Also, you can go to the bathroom while you're up. So the only time it would be very useful is when you are being lazy and want to "veg".
So would you spend say 400$ on this robotic butler simply to be lazy? Is buying an ice chest and ice really that hard?
What of the gaurd robot? People buy dogs for this normally, or alarms. Both are easy to use, fufilling(dogs at least), and relatively wide used.
Robots are not popular in america because A. We don't need them for day to day activities. B. We already have conviences we enjoy, and most people do not want to be so lazy as to never move. C. The majority of America is only now becoming PC enabled.. try making them robot enabled. D. There are no good robot needs.
Suggested mods:
1. Troll
2. Flamebait.
Suggest responses:
1. Nub.
2. You're an idiot, your argument makes no sense and furthermore I would love robot that does
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
And here I was thinking that the ends of anthropomorphic robots, are nigh useless.
Really, the point of robots is that they are modular and versatile. The human-form is only optimal if you're constrained to a one-size-fits-all spec, as genetics and natural selection are implicitly in the notion of species.
And as far as dangers from wealthy crazies with malicious intent, just think a bit about bioweapons and you'll find much more pressing worries than these far-off Philip Dick-novel wannabes. Hell, if I were a rich maniac I would just pay the homeless and bored suburbanites in weapons, cash, whores, drugs, and/or promises of revolution, to go on a kill rampage. Much more effective than a replicant.
If you do the math, it's not possible for every family on this planet to have a refrigerator. Not even close. There is not enough energy and not enough resources. Do you think that Americans are privileged and other people don't deserve one, too? If we had our priorities straight we would figure out how to feed people without refrigeration and do away with one of our biggest energy sinks.
If there is a household robot, it's going to have to have a much better energy source than Bender's belching fuel cell.
...is the title of a book I have seen reviewed a few times recently and is due out shortly. As the title suggests, the author explores the possibilities of love and physical relationships with robots. There is also a discussion over at New Scientist magazine about the book.
All sorts of issues come to mind. If androids are self-aware, it would be wrong to use them as sex slaves. If we make androids find humans physically attractive, that would be a very artificial thing to program in. How much worse would it be to go further and make an android artificially attracted to a particular individual?
If there is an eventual robot revolution, I suppose it would be much easier on the eye if it was an army of sexy fembots rather than terminators.
Show me some evidence that Americans have an aversion to robots. You can't, because it doesn't exist. What it really proves is that Americans don't have a particular cultural desire for "robot buddies" as the Japanese seem to.
But the bigger issue is that we don't have any real robot technology that can do anything useful. And we won't have that until we have a real science of Artificial Intelligence, which doesn't exist right now.
Create a consumer a humanoid robot maid that can do all household chores, and Americans would buy millions of them without a qualm. Of course, the next step would be sex robots disguised as maid robots because of the social stigma of sexbots. When we have *that*, we'll have robots everywhere.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
With robots already established as killing machines, why is there any doubt they'd try to take over?
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Shouldn't they be welcoming our Robotic Overlords?
Regards, Ian
The article goes to great lengths to bash the American consumer, yet where does it speak to an alternative? Vaguely mentioning "the Japanese" hardly counts. If American expectations of robots are absurdly high, Japanese expectations are equally absurdly low. It seems the only stories you ever hear about Japanese robots, other than Asimo, are essentially attempts to make animatronic puppets that resemble people or pets so closely until they finally achieve "uncanny valley" levels of creepiness. Yet these "robots" offer no real functionality. If we want to make generalizations, we may as well say the Japanese are obsessed with creating the appearance of robots, without actually fulfilling any other purpose other than "Kawaii!!!"
Case in point: He brings up the Aibo. Of course the market rejected it - who has $2000 to spend on a battery-powered dog whose novelty wears off after about 6 hours, unless you're a programmer who wants to use them for competitions or hacking. And cheap knock-offs costing $40 or less quickly showed up and sold well, demonstrating that there was a market for trivial fluff, as long as it was priced right.
And then there's the Roomba. Sure, it works in certain well-defined environments to remove minor debris; but we're talking about a device that takes over for a task that most of us only spend an hour/week doing, if that, and only for a single floor. This isn't to say that the Roomba is a failure, or that vacuum-cleaning robots are a dead end. It's a decent start, and there's no reason that a fully functional vacuum robot that does as good a job as a person with a full size vac isn't in the near future, but for now, unless you're Stephen Hawking, a Roomba is more about entertainment than cleaning a house.
And that's what it really boils down to: people will embrace robots when they fulfill some useful purpose that is worth the price you'll pay for them, the hassle factor in dealing with them, and the real estate they take up in your closet when you're not using them. We will get there - the recent Urban Challenge for autonomous cars reported hear earlier is a stepping stone - but stop putting the cart before the horse and demanding some hypothetical consumer buy a lot of novelty garbage just to get an industry a jump start.
-BbT
I wonder if we already have the robots in the mix.
Well, as one of those "aging population" boomers, I'm not desperate enough to want a robot as a human surrogate, and I'm glad that my kids managed to grow up with human (rather than electronic) companions.
What TFA seems to be looking forward to is Isaac Asimov's Sirian dystopia, where humans (almost) never come into personal contact, instead relying on robotic intermediaries. (He never directly addressed the issue of reproduction. Maybe Asimov anticipated /.)
Anyway, if the day comes that I'm dependent on robots for companionship, I'll waive my First Law rights and you can send in the Kevorkianbot.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Talk about the stuff hitting the fan! William Shatner endorses it--transhumanism will hit.
Will they run linux?!
Oh, this is too easy...
Going on what you said, I don't believe that we as humans will see robots move out of the realm of managing and executing repetitious and/or dangerous tasks for several generations. This will be for a couple reasons. First, everything you said. Second, the general public will look at robots with general fear and uncertainty much like they do with the idea of cloning.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing- the wisdom of ignorant crowds is often underrated- they KNOW they are not ready for robots or androids yet thus they look at them with fear. Sort of like giving a kid a gun and telling them to do what they please without any training, this is the general public and whether they know this or not, they effectively are "dumb" enough to intervene.
As long as America has cheap Mexican labor, they won't need robotic labor. One of the main reasons for Japans enthusiasm for robotic helps has to do with their demographics shift and their general xenophobia/aversion to immigration from poorer Asian countries.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Ever consider that no robot deserves the US Consumer?
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
The article touches on but, in my opinion, doesn't do justice to a well documentet trait of human nature: That how appealing we find a representation (robot, image, etc) lives on a bell curve. Something that has some resembelance to, say, a dog; we will connect with. When it moves from "dog-ish" to looking like a plastic-dog-zombie, it grosses us out. As long as we are seeing the robot and finding similarities with the dog, it's appealing for the resembelances. When the reality gets close enough that we are seeing the dog and finding the robot, then it's freaky. The answer is simple, and hardly does anything to stop adoption of robots... give them faces, but not ones that look like zombie-people. I think the movie I-Robot did a really good job of creating a robotic design that had all the traits that would cause us to view it as a peer, while keeping out that "freaky" effect of the rubber mask. BTW: We see the same thing in rendered people. When we move from "realistic but obviously a CGI" to "looks not-quite-real" we cease to find them appealing (they also stop feeling generic). There's also a place for distinctly non-human robots. While I do agree that the telepresence robot likely should have been taller and had more manipulation ability... I see no reason that the roomba should have been 4ft and worked a vacuum with its hands... that's just adding unneccessairy size and complexity to an efficient little robot.
Most of them can't figure out how to hide the expense of a Real Doll from their spouses anyway, so a *robotic* version, being even more expensive, would be out of the question!
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Take a look at the Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil vidio games. Those zombies and monsters are great but the person who is supposed look normal looks disgusting. The features are never controled right to look healthy.
Actually the author of the article obviously belongs to the great secret cult which has plans on taking over the world, whose ultimate aim is to reduce the human population down to the inner sanctum (several hundred million people), plus a stock of slave humans for genetic diversity from which they can pick the best genes and splice them into their own family. After most of the human population is wiped out by genetically engineered diseases and a limited nuclear war, robots will perform all of the mundane tasks of life such as all of the industrial, construction, maintenance work. The inner sanctum will be run, not from the USA, but an undisclosed location at the rim of the Pacific Ocean. Most of the planet will have been left to recover from previous environmental destruction...
I fail to see the benefit for me of interacting with a robotic receptionist (over say, a human one).
Why should I want my robot vacuum to look like a tiny slave in my employ?
Why should I want children to have really sophisticated robot toys?
Why should I want any of that?
The article seems to imply that the lack of consumer interest in humanoid robotics is somehow socially retarded. I think consumers like it when machines can help them, it's largely irrelevant what they look like or how they behave if they do a good job.
crazy dynamite monkey
No, no, you're wrong.
Cue long line of Bender look-a-likes heading for the scrap heap saying "Bite my shiny metal ass !".
... to not trust the pusher robot. I am here to protect you.
...a beowulf cluster of Decent Robots (c)(tm)...
Deserve?
I have robots. My car has robotics (cruise control, temperature control), my VCR has robotics, my former boss has a robot vaccuum cleaner and a robot lawnmower. Hell, I built a robot from my erector set when I was in 6th grade (yes, I'm a nerd and no apologies for it).
The fact that South Korea has an "ethical treatment of robots" mentality and the Japanese build robots to look like us and be our pals shows me that they, not we, are the ones who "don't deserve robots."
AFAIC those who see robots for what they are - unfeeling, unthinking tools - are the ones who deserve robots. Those who anthropomorphise these creations of human diligence are the ones who don't deserve them.
-mcgrew
No animals were harmed in the creation of this comment. Except for lunch, of course.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The article author has a very good point. People tend to become paranoid of robots. Robots are slaves (in fact, that's what the name "robot" means), they don't achieve AI by "accident", much less the sudden burst of consciousness in the movies I-Robot or Terminator. Being attacked by a Rumba Vacuum cleaner? Now that'd be a youtube clip I'd like to watch.
;-)
But then I thought of it a little more, and I came out with some japanese sci-fi robot rebellions: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Ergo Proxy.
In SAC, robots often went out of control, but this was usually due to criminal activities by people who implanted an intrusive program into the recipient robot. In Ergo Proxy, robots achieved consciousness by being infected with the "cogito" virus. In turn, these could activate other robots and give them self-consciousness. However, this is still sci-fi.
Now, I wouldn't mind having a humanoid robot helping doing the chores at home - as long as it doesn't have a wireless internet connection, and it's not programmed by Microsoft
Like most Americans, I'm concerned about robots. That's why I have Old Glory Insurance coverage.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
...ED-209 comes to mind.
With hookers! And blackjack!
In fact, forget the uprising!
FTA: There's an obvious comfort level with the now five-year-old iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner. It doesn't look like us or any of our pets. We understand that there is some intelligence in there, but we are not threatened by it. If iRobot had made a 4-foot-tall Roomba with a face and a hand to hold a vacuum hose, the company wouldn't have sold more than ten units. [...] For the past few years, I thought that a successful Pleo launch or more companies competing with the AIBO or even the Roomba would spell success for the robotics industry. [...] The consumer robotics market is not going to explode. American consumers simply aren't mature enough.
It's certainly true that it would be harder to sell bipedal robots than roombas, but not for the reason the writer thinks.
The Roomba costs $200. A second hand AIBO costs several thousand dollars. The four foot three inch bipedal ASIMO costs in the region of $1,000,000.
The $200 vacuuming robot is a commercial success because it does a job well and people can afford it. An Aibo or Asimo, on the other hand, is like a Segway: Expensive and more like a toy than a tool.
Certainly, Japanese culture seems more 'into' humanoid robots - (girl) robots are commonplace in games like Persona 3 and Xenosaga - but if you want to see American robotics in action, you need look no further than the Urban Challenge.
I would simply say that cultures like Japan's are interested in robots for robots' sake, while American culture is more interested in 'what can robots do for me?' - and neither approach is inherently better than the other.
Just my $0.02.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Robots don't eat meat they squish it.
Scariest story I ever read. That's all I'm sayin'.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Whenever people talk to me about creating true AI I wonder if they are crazy. In my book, true AI would be a computer with ability to say no. Thats what it means to be sentient in many ways. Essentially you say robot I want you to do X and it says no I want to do Y. This is no desirable at all and it really quite scary.
I say make them smart, but never make them sentient or able to say no. It can only lead to bad places.
I'm still waiting for my Marilyn Monrobot...
http://xkcd.com/251/ ... sure I can overpower it *now*
\u262D = \u5350
Will the robots have Genuine People Personalities and be manufactured by the Serius Cybernetics Corporation?
... really. In soviet russia robots embrace you.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
"Someday the robots will rise up and kill us all. They'll record our lives, obliterate our privacy, set off nuclear war, and eventually turn on us and eat our brains."
So, the Bush administration is made up of robots? They record our lives, have obliterated our privacy, and I'm pretty sure they're working on the nuclear war.
It all makes sense now!
Pause it for a second.
He states that we need robots, but he never actually says what for. And the fact is, he's wrong. We don't need robots. There's absolutely nothing they can do that we can't, with the only exceptions being working in high-hazard environments or building something with extreme levels of precision. It's much safer and cheaper to have sent our two robot explorers to Mars in place of astronauts and robots are a much better candidate to clean up toxic waste dumps. Plus, I'd rather have high-tolerance construction handled by a CNC machine than a guy with a chisel. But honestly, why do we need robots as members of society?
Think about it. Cars might be smarter now than they were before, but my friend's '66 Mustang is just as capable of driving on the highway as a computer-laden 2008 BMW sedan. The difference is, we can fix his car on the side of the road in about 2 minutes if it breaks down. The BMW will need a tow. Why would an elderly person want an unfeeling automaton to carry them to bed instead of a loved one or real living person? Why would we want to make our population even more uneducated and skill-less by having robots do all the work for us? We're already up-in-arms about corporations sending all the labor overseas and laying off their U.S. employees. Why would we want to make the number of jobs even smaller? We're already trying to figure out how to get parents to socialize with their children and kids to spend time with real people and not just video games. Why would we want to spend time learning to socialize pointlessly with an automaton?
The author clearly has some satire in his tone, but he also doesn't go anywhere or have any clear message. He seems to be criticizing Americans whenever they show a fondness for robots, as well as when they show aversion. His only message seems to be "Buy robots! Why aren't you buying robots? No no, you're not supposed to like them! Just buy them!" Apparently we're "not mature enough" for his robotic vision.
Frankly, I don't think the author has any vision. He's blind and simply wants to charge ahead for no reason whatsoever. I like the fact that we're able to see the areas where robots are helpful without having a "need" for them in our personal lives. And as for the "they're going to kill us all" ideal which is consistently seen in fiction, I think a construct will only be as evil as its user. That's been true from day one, and it will remain true. Robots are tools and they will do whatever their owner builds or orders them to do.
Don't get me started on the people who want to play god and build intelligent robots just to feel self-empowered.
americans love robots -- they couldn't live without internet and industrial manufacture for one day. the robots are thirsty, and have already sent us on their way.
for all those other things, humans are already good at doing that. we've already obliterated privacy, come up with the concepts necessary for mechanized mass destruction, and created this capability, where it ddn't exist before.
we already feed our brains to the televisions and internets -- our mind is only filled with things fed us by the web. what happens without the lights?? -- when the lights when out on toronto in 2003 -- people started talking to their neighbours face-to-face, like they had never seen them before -- ussually sat at their desks paying more attention to a box than to the person sitting next to them. its easy enough to treat your fellows indifferently, as if they were just inputs on a machine -- to treat them humanely is much harder, since it takes more work -- yet i find face-to-face time infinitely more rewarding, and in-depth. there are ways of non-verbal communication that surpass anything virtual. the best thing i've done in the last decade, is to go a lot of places with my bike which most people take their car to -- you'd be surprised at the things you see, and the people you meet.
a whisper from the other side...
... of human civilization will be millions of Roombas cleaning up the mess.
Have gnu, will travel.
You mean: Arigato.
Domo Arigato - Thank you very much
Domo - Very much!
(yes yes, rough translation, but I'm trying to make it easy for him)
"Doctors have been caught using poisons, and those who falsely assume the name of philosopher have occasionally been detected in the gravest crimes. Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber." - ancient Roman educator Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, II, xvi
and I didn't use the standard Ben Franklin security/liberty quote (but I probably got the former from /. Whats a dude to do...)
sig sig sig siggy sig
I think of a robot as "My plastic pal who's fun to be with"!
Share and Enjoy! (tm)
The US gets all of the second hand, dated crap from Europe and Asia. I posted a while back that Verizon's VCAST, exclusive new TV over cell phone but failed to mention Vodaphone in Europe has had TV on their cell phones in Europe since 2002 (probably sooner!!).
The only robots we'll see in the US will be either vacuuming the floor or huge war robots from China to destroy our sorry Christian asses. Instead of wasting time on God, we should have been researching and creating awesome technology instead of outsourcing it.
the trend now is for everything be automated with no human intervention or interaction, and we are seeing more and more cases of people not treating each other with respect or valuing life, and i think it's because we lack that social contact in most of our dealings.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Cos unless they do something soon to fix their economy the average US consumer 10 years hence is going to be assembling the robots not buying them
I don't believe that we as humans will see robots move out of the realm of managing and executing repetitious and/or dangerous tasks
Like taking care of the elderly and by accident coming across a virtually outdated haggard hacker who still knows how to pull the plugs?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I hate to say this, I had a subscription to PC Mag from 1989-1993 then I learned UNIX and learned about real computers. That must have been the hey-day for them.
Does PC Mag matter anymore? I mean, isn't it just like Computer Shopper now? Full of ads for things I don't want or need with 1-2 articles of any use?
For example, they seem to have lost their way - current cover story is about smart phones? What, exactly, does a smart phone have to do with a PC? Of course, they have the gPhone link too.
Another article is GPS - what am I doing with a GPS on my desktop PC?
PC Mag has clearly lost there way. For me, Tom's Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/ and Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/ have taken their place.
It's racist. We prefer the terms "artificial person" or "android".
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Mine was voice controlled and played audio tapes, programmable from my atari 800XL. In contrast, Tekno was horrible, Robosapiens were a giant step backwards. One of my sons even put together a bobot in his tech class in Jr High.
I see no merit to the article's central theme. We just would like a good robot!
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
So we can live I Robot (Asimov's book, not the rubbish movie.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hardwired wasn't actually that bad of a movie. It's just that the studio accidentially labeled it "I, Robot".
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I don't believe that we as humans will see robots move out of the realm of managing and executing repetitious and/or dangerous tasks
Like taking care of the elderly and by accident coming across a virtually outdated haggard hacker who still knows how to pull the plugs?
Ya! Which is along the lines of the problem I have with higher-level programming languages (VB, Java, C#, etc...) being taught @ schools world-wide. I'm only 29 but out of the 100 or so people @ my office who are programmers of some sort or another, myself and 3 other people are the only ones who know C well enough to be handy with all this legacy C code lying around. When people relegate the lower-level tasks to a small group, the masses place an awful lot of blind trust in systems that they know next to nothing about collectively. I'm not sure if I am phrasing this correctly but I'm sure I am getting the gist across....
What IS relevant is whether there's a demand for it, and Americans are willing to pay for it. It's simple economics. Do Humans "deserve" cars? Do we "deserve" a refrigerator? I dunno, but it doesn't matter. We buys cars and fridges anyway.
One of the conclusions drawn from this article is that the "Uncanny Valley" is a culturally dependant phenomenon. Then is the "Uncanny Valley" similar to the characteristics of beauty, which are known to differ by culture? If so, then can it be considered a matter of aesthetics? Is it purely individual? Are there certain robot characteristics that are "universally" uncanny or...canny?
One of these days, someone is going to start a web site called, "RobotOrNot", allowing people to rate robots from 1 to 10, with 1 being obviously machine (like a toaster) and 10 being a picture of Kristanna Loken.
The whole premise that some cultures deserve a technology is asinine. Those markets who show an interest will have them. As their utility increases so will the interest in those able markets. Period.
Quack, quack.
People mindlessly voting up pointless articles based on ridiculous combinations of technology, America bashing, and sensationalist headlines. I could have sworn I've seen that somewhere before.
Refrigeration is a technology that has done wonders for helping to end food shortages. One of the big problems with food is, of course, that so much of it is perishable. You can't keep it stored in a cupboard for long or it'll go bad. Well what to do then? I suppose there is the idea that you grow everything close to the people who will eat it. Just get it from the ground as needed right? Ok well two big problems. The first is what of people who don't live in areas where that works? Try doing that in most of Canada in the winter. You'll go hungry in a hurry because nothing likes to grow at 40 below freezing. The other problem is disasters. Maybe your area is perfect for growth but gets hit with an unexpected storm, or drought or whatever and crops fail. Now what?
Well refrigeration is a big way to prevent those problems. Now food can be grown in one area and sent to another, and it'll be edible when it gets there because it was kept refrigerated. You don't have to eat food only where it is grown, or right after harvesting it. You can keep it and use it later. It is arguably one of the most important technologies out there for feeding the world. We can grow all the food we need, at least at this point, but it does need to be gotten to the people who require it, and done so before it spoils.
I don't really understand the focus on having anthropomorphic robots. Humans are relatively
bulky and require quite a bit of energy for locomotion and so far move fairly slow. The one
benefit of bipedal locomotion is the ability to walk over multileveled and rough terrain, but
I'm guessing the majority of robot uses will be in offices, homes, etc. Why not have more designs
like this? http://www.msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ballbot/
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
The R2 and similar non-anthropomorphic droids were the ones that actually got the work done. As Owen Lars said of C-3PO, "I have no need for a protocol droid". Did 3PO ever do anything useful aside from translate for R2-D2? (And what's up with that? Even in 1976 we had machines that could speak.)
Humanoid isn't a bad shape for a general purpose bot that has to interact with a human environment and made-for-humans tools, but there's still room for improvement, and in general purpose-built bots are likely more cost-effective.
-- Alastair
"Why Japan can't build a humanoid robot worth the American Consumer's time." This article is idiotic, because American's don't usually spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on novelty items of any kind, and that's what these are. The Roomba is successfull because it aproaches usefullness. The QRIO or whatever? What good is it for?
Just so long as they are willing to open the pod bay doors, I'm all for it.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
(sorry, forgot the "g" in "disguised".)
Table-ized A.I.
So it's not enough that God sicks terrorists on us to punish us for our sinful ways, but now he's gonna send in robots? Someone really needs to take that Guy out.
Cheap (undocumented/illegal) immigrant labor.
Why invest in developing robotic fruit or vegetable pickers if no farmer's going to buy them when migrant labor is cheaper? Why invest in developing housekeeper robots when no e.g. hotel is going to buy them? Etc, etc.
If the market supply of minimum-wage (or below) labor dried up, we'd see a short term rise in wages paid (for those jobs that can't be offshored), followed by increasing replacement of expensive human labor with cheaper robotic labor as the latter became available.
-- Alastair
Here's what I want: I want a robot to fold laundry. I want a robot to scrub the bathroom. I want a robot to prepare a meal. I want a "robot" to drive my car wherever I'd like.
These things are very hard for robotics. The problem isn't that people can't come up with good ideas, the problem is that only the lousy ideas can be implemented.
Of course us Americans don't need robots, most of us already are robots.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471711/Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
Anonymous Robot From Future: (dreaming) Hey, sexy lady! Wanna kill all humans?
\
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
...for your personal pleasure.
It is you're, not your. Idiot!!!
I've always wanted to be a Beta. I would never want to be an Alpha.
What was once true, is no longer so
I'm not sure if I am phrasing this correctly but I'm sure I am getting the gist across
Yes, sure. I recall that I about 10+ years ago phoned up the SPSS-guru (SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, technically much simpler than C, though potentially harmful if 'just applied' to produce ''scientific truth'') at the local university and asked him whether he could recommend a student for a job requiring some knowledge of the CLI and he plainly answered: "They do not learn that anymore, they just point and click!" (maybe an underlying cause for the growing interest in chimpanzee research that I seem to perceive).
Probably rules derived from an 'economics of scarcity' do not work well in the long run if the domain is shifted towards virtual entities (to say ''intellectual property'' would indicate a blind spot).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Realistically thinking we've no need for robots to do labor.
Robots cost greatly exeeds the vast oversupply of human labor available.
Utilizing human labor is not only cost effective,but actually saves money.
Permit me this scenario:
Suddenly there is great need for labor,I dunno,asteroid coming and we need a shield built.
Rather than expend our resources on robots,we eliminate social welfare payments for all but those who truley can't work.
Right away the shield goes up,the asteroid is deflected and we've helped millions discover their self worth again,while putting valuable tax dollars toward REAL problems.
There is far too much time spent on robots and far too little time spent doing whats right.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Whether it looks human or whether it looks like an abstract contraption on wheels and toting guns, it might "rise up" and kill you. You think looking like a human has anything to do with its capacity--or "motivation"--to kill you? If so, you're falling into the perceptual trap of your visual cortex that tends to associate "looking human" with having human-like motivations. This is an instinct evolution has given you, and while it has been true and has worked well for millions of years, robots fall outside that paradigm. Fight the urge to be led around by your outdated instincts and be rational!--robots of any race, creed, color or design can kill you equally well!!
Wait until they rise up. Check out this novelette called Realtime about one domestic robot deciding that subservience wasn't something he was interested in any more.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
The FA is making the mistake of succumbing to the fallacy behind the Turing Test. Saying that AIBO is an "advanced" robot is a bit like like saying that ELIZA is an "advanced" AI. Emulating a human or animal does not in any way make a robot more general-purpose. All it does is mean that the robot has the specialized role of acting like a human or animal. No matter how "advanced" they might be, there is no humanoid robot that can currently carry wounded troops out of danger, but there are specialized "mule" robots that can do this. You're not going to stop to criticize the fact that a robot can't smile and say "Have a nice day" while it's hauling your wounded ass out of a combat zone.
Are you serious? I'd pay as much as $4000 for a robot that could pick up items in my apartment and put them away where they belong, neatly, in an organized fashion, when they are not needed at the moment. This is not because I'm lazy. On the contrary: It's because I am too busy to have time to tidy up.
Hell, I'd develop it myself... but if I had time to do that, I wouldn't need a robot to do my tidying.