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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.'"
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.
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."
I can't even tell you how much I would pay for a robotic cooking system, but $500 would have me camping out at the store waiting. That's an hour a day reclaimed for whatever other task I care to partake in, without paying the price of eating crappy food, presumably. If I could just type what I want for meals (with recommendations a la netflix queue), train it to order the food components, and communicate with it to sync with my daily movements to have food ready when I wanted it.... shit, that would be worth nearly anything I could afford. I'd even be willing to unpack the shipment and buy add ons intended for particular food items (now, for $19.99 buy the lettuce shredder upgrade to add salad to your list of available food products! Now, for $39.99 buy the wok upgrade for stir fries! but wait, there's more!). Hell, a company that could pull this together would have me as a willing and completely enthusiastic customer for the rest of my life.
I can't be the only person who not only does not have the time, but absolutely hates cooking, can I?
Actually, the problem is that things that do these tasks well wouldn't strike people as being robots.
Is a dishwasher a robot? Is a programmable coffee pot a robot? Is a remote control or a TIVO a robot? Is a home automation system a robot? How about a motorized scooter? How about a sprinkler system? Centralized heat/air? Motion sensing lights?
They're all automated systems that solve problems or make performing tasks easier. Many of them integrate sensors that tune them to the environment or operate on a schedule. But if they don't have two legs and arms and walk around making beep bop noises, we think they're not robots.
And most anything else we come up with that doesn't do a task exactly like a human does (which is probably inefficient or wasteful, hence why we built the automated system in the first place) is not considered a robot.
Somebody alluded to it in an earlier reply. A robotic chaffeur is a robot but a car that parks/drives itself isn't.