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Willow Garage Robot Fetches Beer, Engineers Rejoice
kkleiner writes "Willow Garage has pulled off the ultimate engineering feat: teaching a PR2 robot to fetch you a beer from the fridge. Not only can the PR2 select the correct brew from the fridge, it can deliver, and even open the beer as needed. That's right, all the humans have to do is drink and relax. Prepare yourself for some major robot-envy as you check out the PR2 delivering much-needed refreshment in the video."
Stock in females is going to take a dive
... of the 21st century.
Signatures are the new names.
It is things like this that make me feel there is hope for humanity, and that we're not in an unstoppable downward spiral.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
A cooler filled with beer sitting next to your chair is cheaper, faster, and doesn't require a specialized, dedicated refrigerator. And think of all the beer you could buy for the price of one robot (and if the robot were really cool, like Bender, he'd drink all your beer before he could deliver it).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But does it have a sassy attitude?
We really do live in a golden age, (sniff)
my girlfriend does it better and she has big boobs
Everything is fine until the robot starts getting uppity. "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"
"Man who sleep in beer keg wake up sticky."
Narf narf narf.
big one or little one?
If this continues both bums and fake IDs will Become Obsolete.
It needs bigger boobs and bare feet.
Why a web interface? seriously...
Can it be taught to cut you off?
"Buddy, I can't let you drive home without breaking rule 1."
I can't wait for the App!
Anybody else ever read the book "Robots have no Tails" written over 50 years ago by Henry Kuttner and his wife?
I remember thinking it was fall-over funny as a teenager at least-- one of the stories in the book revolved around an inventor who created the world's most intelligent and capable robot. Unfortunately he created it while he was on a drunken bender and had no idea what purpose he had intended for the robot now that he was sober. In the end he finds that he had created the perfect robot so it could fetch and open beers for him.
I'm taking the little "6x" in the corner of the video when the robot is taking the beer to be time scale. The thing takes 15 seconds to open the door, and another minute to grab 2 beers while the door is wide open. Awesome work, but I'm sure this could be done better.
This is indeed news of the highest importance, and a technological feat worthy of major consideration in the scientific community! I've got a Moderator Point. Now if I only had a Nobel Prize vote...
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If so...
sudo get me a beer
... welcome our robotic beer-fetching overlords.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Glass. Ice. Gin. Tonic. A squeeze of lime. Your cocktail, Dr. Marner.
Until it can deliver the beer at the optimum serving temperature for the style, remove a cork & cage, choose the right type of glass and pour it leaving the sediment in the bottom of the bottle (if there is any), not interested.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I like the robot idea, but it's a bit slow: At 1:40 it shows the robot fetching a beer in 1 minute, but it's sped up 5x, so it really took 5 minutes to get one beer.
5 minutes to get me a beer? Think I'll just get a dog.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Wonder why they felt it necessary to speed up the video of the robot interacting with the fridge?
...but so do dogs that are trained to do the same thing. But unlike a dog, a robot won't chew your shoes, defecate in the yard, or lack opposable digits to pop the top on a beer bottle. Still, that entire issue of looking for a charging port in the middle of the night kind of bothers me.
For possibilities on restructuring our economy to deal with the decining valued of human labor from similiar innovations, starting from Marshall Brain's ideas and including many other people's suggestions, see this section of a knol I organized on moving beyond the jobless recovery resulting from structural unemployment (due to automation, robotics, better design, voluntary social networks, and limited demand due to "reduce, reuse, recycle" and the law of diminishing returns etc.): http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
Believers in mainstream economic theology saw fit to delete most of that content from Wikipedia in part on the grounds that Marshall Brain's and other people's points on the declining value of most human labor is just "speculation" and science fiction. Our scarcity-based economics is more and more out-of-sync with our social and technical realities of potential abundance, but it is apparently heresy to talk about it, and the most people will usually do is talk about ways to make "artificial scarcity" to keep the system working via "business as usual".
I've been thinking about the social aspects of advanced robotics on and off for a quarter century since I spent a year hanging out in Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab (and Red Whittaker's FRL) around 1985 (when Hans was working on the book "Mind Children"). I applied to Willow Garage a couple months ago to get these robots to pick up toys, sort LEGO, etc. (be nice to have them do food prep, too, for improved human health) but they were not interested. :-( Though I was looking for something where I could work from home on the East Coast, so that may have been part of it, since what (human) homeschooling family guy can afford to buy a house with room for a human child near Stanford? :-) I'm also not blaming them, since they probably have their pick of applicants, and I have not worked professionally with robots in two decades, and I have spent a lot of the past decade doing stay-at-home Dad stuff. I'm not sure *I'd* even hire me at this point to do anything technical. :-) Still, with the Stanford area being as pricey as it is, Willow Garage is probably mostly left with rich people or young people building these mind children, which is why you see this video of a robot fetching a beer and not, say, putting away toys, preparing a nutritious soup for the family from whole foods, or being a good playmate for a human child (like Robbie in Asimov's story about a robot nanny and playmate). I can hope that those sorts of things will come sooner rather than later.
Working with a PR2 might have been a lot of fun, but in any case I had also hoped applying might get the people (and maybe eventually robots :-) at Willow Garage to at least read my writings like the above about socio-economic apsects of this work. Creating technology like this without at the same time promoting social change as outlined above (to a gift economy, a basic income, local subsistence, and/or a resource-based economy) is otherwise just asking for massive social unrest and suffering, like Marshall Brain talks about in his short story "Manna". Willow Garage is getting everything else right (like a FOSS focus and as in this video obvious technical excellence) -- except it may be missing talking about that economic transition big picture part needed to make robots like this a blessing and not a curse. So, in that sense, Willow Garage may dangerously lack a coherent vision (even if it makes amazing technology)? I don't know -- they may be clued in and not talking about it, but is does not seem to be reflected on the web site, with nothing directly relevant for these searches:
http://www.google.co
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Love how it goes all limp wristed at 2:00 :)
it takes 5:30 sec JUST to get the beer out of the fridge...by then its not cold anymore....I could have opened it and downed the fucker myself in that time
Shew chewing & outdoor defecation? Those specs are not due until Beerbot 2.0 a/k/a "FratBot" (backwards hat compatible)
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Well, yes, but they do wonders with injection molding these days so you don't have to (go into an alcoholic coma;)) Have you seen a Real Doll? (Probably not safe for work.) I'm sure they can make the robot fit inside one of those and walk upright with several kilos worth of silicone boobs tacked on the front, and then injection-mold the rest of the doll around it.
Sure, it might lack much facial expressions and such, but then again she probably won't file her nails during the act and ask if you're finished either. So, you gotta take the good with the bad. Plus, we're on Slashdot. Some of us couldn't tell body language if it came and kicked us in the nuts. (Oh yeah, it must mean she likes me;)) So no big loss.
Plus, think positively. You'll probably be able to customize it to your taste, rather than take whatever face or body shape you happen to be compatible with otherwise. (I.e., doesn't charge an arm and a leg;))
Still, I'm not much into beer myself. If they could make one that plays a healer on WoW or COH well, though, now that's gonna be true love ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
God I hate my job.
Why cant it drink the beer for me too, and metabolize it BTW? Shit I need mo bots to fill in every wasted second of time that I spend doing things myself. I didn't really want these legs to begin with.
Seems that successful beer running is a Robotics printed Hello World.
1. It does not look like Bender.
2. It does not open the bottles with a laser. WTF? All that effort to build a beer-fetching robot, and NOBODY thought of lasers? Are you freaking KIDDING me? What is wrong with these people?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If you are the sort of knowledge worker who can program robots, your labor is not in competition with the abilities of this robot.
In general, people in modern countries are expected to constantly do more and more complex things for the same pay. Think of it as a physical Turing test.
There is no upper limit on how much work there is to do, as you said there is no scarcity - of work. Don't worry about robots making us all jobless.
"If you are the sort of knowledge worker who can program robots, your labor is not in competition with the abilities of this robot."
And what about any relatives or friends or neighbors or citizens I might care about? And besides, what if in the next twenty years this research leads to more general AIs, especially as computing costs continue to drop? Also, you are ignoring that even if some human abilities remain of value for a time, technology is an amplifier, so soon one programmer will be able to do the work of two, or three, or hundreds. Besides, how much do such robots need to be programmed? People may develop some general learning algorithms, but the such systems can learn within restricted domains on their own, and with millions of networked robots, the entire network will learn pretty fast. I know of that happening in other areas of technology, like speech recognition and character recognition (I used to contract at IBM Research around the time of some of this changeover from hand coded recognizers to careful training in limited areas to broad statistical inferencing). So, your point misses the big picture of what is happening, IMHO.
On economics, what makes you so sure there is not upper limit on work to do? Really, how many cars does a person need? How big a house? How much fatter should people be? How much more junk do they need in their lives? The most enlightened people on the planet often tend to be the ones who are reducing their needs to a minimum. There already is a backlash against consumerism, for several reasons. And beyond that, 3D printers and robots will be able to produce so much, that there just will not be too much work anyway, even if people consume a lot. A related discussion I participated in on limited demand:
"[p2p-research] Fwd: More on the Supply and Demand Curve"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-July/003545.html
Mainstream economics is built on at least two key assumptions. One is that demand will rise faster than production efficiency (otherwise there would be permanent layoffs if demand rose more slowly than efficiency increases, and if efficiency increases stop, then prices drop towards zero through highly competitive capitalist competition in a free market and the economy freezes up, which is why economist are so obsessed with economic growth, since otherwise their equations blow up with divide-by-zero errors, etc.). The other is that the products of smart machines and/or voluntary social networks will never approach in quantity and quality that of what paid labor can produce. Environmentalism and other movements like Voluntary Simplicity, as well as common sense about human psychology and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, show the first assumption is breaking down (as people become more affluent, they tend to become more interested in self-actualizing by making and doing more things on their own). This video shows the second assumption is breaking down, since robots are getting much better. Essentially, you are repeating the dogma of the theology of mainstream economics. I'd suggest that dogma is rapidly becoming more and more questionable (if it ever was accurate as opposed to a self-fulfilling prophecy of artificial scarcity).
The main problem is that people, saying essentially what you are saying, are IMHO sticking their heads in the sand about what is a huge social transformation. Unfortunately, in the USA, often technologists have propertarian-libertarian economics, and it is hard for US technologists to admit that propertarian-libertarianism does not work very well when most human labor has little value and when a few can monopolize vast resources they charge rent for as the rich-get-richer. And when, say, we have massive unemployment (as we do in the USA), something unpredicted by almost all mainstream economists a couple years ago, people just shrug their shoulders, say economies are my
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Woah. I'll have to come back to this one. But you present a compelling case in both posts Paul.
In general I'm against the idea that there is a limit to how far we can go. There is a lot of uncharted territory, that is for sure. We certainly have come up with ways to keep ourselves busy - ways that seemed unimaginable 100 years ago when industrialization greatly reduced the requirements for raw labor.
We cannot be sure that we don't come up with another higher calling that robots can't do over the next 100 years.
Thanks for the comments. I would agree with you that there is no upper limit as to what people would do -- the real issue is how they do it and what social arrangement surround that. For example, when someone plants a Redwood tree seed, how much work are they really doing to produce a huge tree? The tree grows on its own if the conditions are right (granted, it might be more likely to grow with some occasional tending). Our technology as it incorporates robotics and AI will be more like that -- so we'll see things like self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from asteroidal ore and sunlight, same like a Redwood, but the total human intervention required may be minimal (relative to the total outcome in terms of providing living space for millions of humans -- so such a project might preoccupy thousands of people, but with their output amplified so much by technology that the total human labor is a trivial percentage). Our scarcity economics may work OK when humans face the dilemma of work hard as a wage slave or slowly starve, but that economic logic breaks down when the choice is work hard as a slave for someone else for a little bit more or work for yourself and your friends and family and still have a good life. Some people will still choose wage slavery perhaps (ambitious people? stupid ones? addicted ones? desperate ones? materialistic ones? etc.), but I'd suggest more and more people would not and would look for more joyful ways to spend their time. So, we need alternative social arrangements as robotics becomes more and more capable (like this video shows).
There are exceptions even now though. A lot of people at Microsoft or Google were or are millionaires (thorough stock appreciation) and do not have to "work" to have a modest lifestyle; so you would be right to point to examples of that, where people work because they want to change the world somehow (or to have a more profligate use of resources). Human social dynamics, as James P. Hogan suggests, leaves most young people adapted to want to show off somehow to attract a good mate, and showing off materially has been long ingrained in our culture (including buying trophy wives for older guys, or the whole "cougar" thing now in the other direction).
Of course, "men" are already under the gun in our society:
"The End of Men"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
As are families:
"The Two-Income Trap"
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
Robotics just add to other ongoing social trends...
Still, I'd suggest, the dynamics of how society is arranged (and what relationships women prefer and why) would change somewhat if essentially everyone in the society felt like a millionaire through something like a basic income or other fundamental change, as I wrote here:
"Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
"Essentially, with a break in the link between having a job and having a right to consume at a moderate level, workplaces could be organized however they wanted. And potential employees would just vote with their feet about where they wanted to work to make the most money, have the most fun during the day, or do the most good for society as they saw it. While it is true that many unpleasant jobs would no longer find low wage workers to do them, for those jobs, either wages would go up, or they would be automated or redesigned out of existence, for example, like with some towns that have garbage trucks with robot arms to pick up curbside standard garbage cans. So, overall, most of the jobs that remained would be ones that people
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Once again, you have produced an essay of astounding length and intricacy.
While I can't possibly answer to all the nuances of your argument, I agree that our social structure is based on scarcity. We are quickly approaching a post-scarcity society - through labor replacements, more efficient technologies and the potential for superstructures such as solar power satellites, space elevators and so on.
I don't think that decisions about the social aspects of this work lie in the hands of the roboticists, though they probably understand more than anyone the long term potential for their machines to replace all labour. I think that those decisions lie with the general populance.
I for one would love the transition to a gift economy (or perhaps something more like the Star Trek economy) - our capitalistic society has worked well for us so far, but soon the few things that humans can UNIQUELY do will have to be encouraged. Capitalistic mechanisms are very good at keeping the rich rich, like you say. Much better to free people from the need to get enough food and shelter to survive and then to capture the public imagination with mega projects that really do require human involvement.
My main point is that we shouldn't fear technology. I agree with the thesis of your argument which seems to be that massive change is coming, so we better embrace it and prepare for it.
It really is just a matter of time until all the unskilled labor is replaced. I hope at this point that every human whose job is threatened is capable of finding a calling that is uniquely human.