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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.'"
No, he's a robot from the past.
Don't ask, it's complicated.
The enemies of Democracy are
Wait a second, Al Gore isn't president.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
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"
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.
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.
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."
His al-gore-ithms weren't quite up to the task, I guess.
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
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.