A.I. and Robotics Take Another Wobbly Step Forward

CWmike writes to tell us that artificial intelligence and robotics have made another wobbly step forward with the most recent robot from Stanford. "Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing. "It also marks a transition of AI from narrow, carefully defined domains to real-world situations in which systems learn to deal with complex data and adapt to uncertainty. AI has more or less followed the 'hype cycle' popularized by Gartner Inc.: Technologies perk along in the shadows for a few years, then burst on the scene in a blaze of hype. Then they fall into disrepute when they fail to deliver on extravagant promises, until they eventually rise to a level of solid accomplishment and acceptance."

Comments

Hype?

[AnthropomorphicRobot]

This article both points out the problems of over-hyped advances in robots, while also claiming this robot has transitioned away from narrowly defined domains?

The voice recognition & language processing component alone would be years ahead of anything else if it worked well outside of a "narrow, carefully defined domain". It seems like they are yet again over-hyping new research.

Re:People perception

[Chabo]

Even my AI professor in school pointed to Data as really the end-goal of AI research (as well as a character from Battlestar Galactica, though I don't watch that show). I think many people are aware that modern AI has roughly the intelligence of an animal. That's much improved on AI from when the character Data was made, where the intelligence was more like that of a single-cell organism.

Of course, considerations must always be made for disaster...

I'm always amazed how broad a field AI really is; algorithms started in AI theory for moving robots around a room can be applied nearly everywhere.