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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.'"
Is the United States current president really a robot from the future?
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
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.
Domo...
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The article has little or no point. We are, again, a victim of the firehose.
An article is submitted to the firehose that mentions "cool cutting edge technology" and is American bashing. What do you think the outcome will be?
The articles voted up due to the firehose are probably as well examined as most others are by posters who lead their posts with "I did not RTFA".
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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."
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.
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
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
With hookers! And blackjack!
In fact, forget the uprising!
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.
Assuming a ~3-KW fridge (beefy!), 2-person families, that's ~3.333... billion families (I'm being lazy), or 10 terawatts. This, of course, is assuming they're all running all the time.
Total energy production of human civilization: ~15 terawatts - Energy to spare!
Total energy Earth receives from the Sun: 174 petawatts
There needs to be a '-1: Poster is incapable of basic math' mod.
I am a science fantasy fan
But do the robotic overlords run Li... OW! OW OK!
In soviet OW STOP IT
Imagine a beowoURK GURGLE
*thump*
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Agreed. I often find myself saying, "Yeah, I want a robot to get me beer"
It's racist. We prefer the terms "artificial person" or "android".
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
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.
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
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.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471711/Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.