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When Will We Trust Robots?
Kittenman writes "The BBC magazine has an article on human trust of robots. 'As manufacturers get ready to market robots for the home it has become essential for them to overcome the public's suspicion of them. But designing a robot that is fun to be with — as well as useful and safe — is quite difficult.' The article cites a poll done on Facebook over the 'best face' design for a robot that would be trusted. But we still distrust them in general. 'Eighty-eight per cent of respondents [to a different survey] agreed with the statement that robots are "necessary as they can do jobs that are too hard or dangerous for people," such as space exploration, warfare and manufacturing. But 60% thought that robots had no place in the care of children, elderly people and those with disabilities.' We distrust the robots because of the uncanny valley — or, as the article puts it, that they look unwell (or like corpses) and do not behave as expected. So, at what point will you trust robots for more personal tasks? How about one with the 'trusting face'?"
It seems much more likely that a company will figure out sneaky ways to make us trust robots than make robots that much more trustworthy.
so I wouldn't trust it. If it looks like a robot, at least it's being honest - I would trust it much more then.
Sent from my ENIAC
Another of those articles that was already partially addressed in SF 60-70 years ago. The guy named Asimov laid out a chunk of the groundwork. But no, they were busy laughing it off as nonsense.
A robot with *only* Asimov's laws is a pretty good start. A robot programmed with a lot of Social Media crap built in would find itself in violation of a bunch of cases of Rule 1 and Rule 2 pretty fast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
(There were some finesses, etc.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I for one welcome our robot overlords. In fact my roomba has it's own room and I always get out of its way!
Who cares if it gives you the best night of your life?
We do trust current robots implicitly. Robots of all types of deployed and mostly run our industrial and manufacturing industries. They are showing up in the homes as well. The typical robots that you read about or see in movies are typically empowered with logic and AI well beyond anything we can actually create. As long as the 'intelligence' of robots continue to be (easily) understood and fully grasped by us this will not change. When robots start advancing beyond our comprehension that is the point when we will start to fear them, but that holds true of anything beyond our comprehension.
http://interserver.net/
Moving parts will always fail eventually
I could never forgive them for the death of my boy.
I trust my car because I know it's got nearly a hundred years engineering heritage behind it that keeps it from doing things like going left when I steer right, accelerating when I hit the brakes, and exploding in a fireball when I turn it over.
I trust the autopilot in the commercial jet I'm flying in because it's got nearly 80 years of engineering heritage in control theory that keeps it from doing things like flipping the plane upside down for no reason or going into a nose dive after some turbulence, and nearly 70 years of heritage in avionics and realtime computers that keeps it from freezing when a cosmic ray flips a bit in memory or from thinking it's going at the speed of light when it crosses the dateline or flies over the north pole.
I will trust a household robot to go about its business in my home and with my children when there is a similar level of engineering discipline in the field of autonomous robotics. Right now, all but a very select few outfits that make robots are operating like academic environments where the metaphorical duct tape and bailing wire are not just acceptable, but required, components in the software stack.
Why do we need robots that even vaguely look like people? We have people for that, lots of people, people who are quite good at looking like people. A Roomba zipping around on the floor with a cute face and some over sized eyes would just be creepy. Let form follow function and let the various robots look like what they do. If it is a farm robot my guess is that it will look like a tractor, fire fighting robot would be sort of like a fire truck, lawn mowing robot would look like a lawn mower.
So if you want me to trust your robot then don't have it stuck in the corner unable to find its destination.
Where people will soon interact with robots and need to trust them will be robotic cars. My concern is that even after statistically the robot cars have proven themselves to be huge life savers there will always be the one in a million story of the robot driving off the cliff or into the side of a train. People will think, "I'd never do something that stupid." When in fact they would be statistically much more likely to drive themselves off a cliff after they fall asleep at the wheel. So if you are looking for a trust issue the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
I place a lot of trust in my CNC lathes and mills. They always do exactly what our software tells them to do. Inspecting the parts by humans is still required however.
I wouldn't trust a robot for the same reason I don't trust a computer: Because I don't believe for a second that the things that are ethical and moral for me are at all even close to the values held by the designers, who were informed by their profit-seeking masters, what to do, how to do it, where to cut corners, etc.
The problem with trusting robots isn't robots: The problem is trusting the people who build the robots. Because afterall, an automaton is only as good as its creator.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
An insurance plan with a robot clause.
You never know when the metal ones will come for you.
42
Yes, we will trust them. The companies will put killswitches in them to disable them when we don't make the payment on time. To push profits higher, they will charge you for each task the robot completes under your "control." Your bot ordered you dinner? You pay for dinner, plus another dollar to the robo company for that ability because they license that action to you. You thought fees on your cable and cellphone bill were bad....
But 60% thought that robots had no place in the care of children, elderly people and those with disabilities.
At last, we finally know what jobs will be available when robots have replaced the human workforce.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
Robot are just machines. Currently there is no reason no to trust them. Now, if they start giving robots weapons and program them to kill people, then yes, maybe there might be something to worry about.
I will also trust it to break down at the worst times possible, cost a ton of money to repair, and probably cost a nice amount to actually buy.
Be seeing you...
We don't need trustworthy faces for robots, because actual robots don't need faces. They'll just be useful non-anthropomorphic appliances --- the dryer that spits out clothes folded and sorted by wearer; the bed that monitors biological activity and gently sets an elderly person on their feet when they're ready to get up in the morning (with hot coffee already waiting, brewed during the earlier stages of awakening).
I think the real challenge is designing trustworthy robot "hands." No mother will hand her baby over to a set of hooked pincer claws on backwards-jointed insect limbs --- but useful robots need complex, flexible, agile physical manipulators to perform real-world tasks. So, how does one design these to give the impression of innocuous gentleness and solidity, rather than being an alien flesh-rending spider? What could lift a baby from its crib to change a diaper, or steady an elderly person moving about the house, without totally freaking out onlookers?
Doing meaningless, rote work without question, following trends and striving to be identical.
This question turns on the meaning of trust. As I understand the term trust, I only apply it to sentient beings whom I know have the capacity to harm but who reliably choose not to do so. The real question, then, is whether robots will or even can fit this bill.
I will trust them if and only if their "positronic brains" can only be manufactured incorporating Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Otherwise... well, we've all seen those movies.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I would certainly trust a robot to serve me a beer. I'm sure it can be very efficient at it. I would still prefer to have a bartender.
For the same reasons, an elderly that already see very little human interactions, being taken care by a robot. That is depressing solitude in a tin can.
Personal robots are basically mobile computers with servos, and computer software/hardware has a long way to go before it can be considered trustworthy, particularly once it's given as much power as a human.
First there's the issue of trusting the programming. Humans act responsibly because they fear reprisal. Software doesn't have to be programmed to fear anything, or even understand cause and effect. It's more or less predictable how most humans operate, yet there's many potential ways software can be programmed to achieve the same thing, some of which would make it more like a flowchart than a compassionate entity. People won't know how a given robot is programmed, and the business that writes its proprietary closed-source software likely won't say, either.
Second is the issue of security. It's pretty much guaranteed that personal robots will be network-connected to give recommendations, updates on weather/friend status/etc., which opens up the pandora's box of malware. You think Stuxnet etc. are bad, wait until autonomous robots are remotely reprogrammed to commit crimes (say, kill everyone in the building), then reset themselves to their original programming to cover up what happened. With a computer you can hit the power button, boot into a live Linux CD and nuke the partitions; with a robot, it can run away or attack you if you try to power it down or remove the infection.
Even if it's not networked, can you say for certain the chips/firmware weren't subverted with sleeper functions in the foreign factory? Maybe when a certain date arrives, for example. Then there's the issue of someone with physical access deliberately reprogramming the robot.
Finally, the Uncanny Valley has little to do with the issue. It may affect how much it can mollify a frightened person, but not how proficient it is at providing assistance. If a human is caring for another human, and something unusual happens to the person they're caring for, they have instincts/common sense as to what to do, even if that just means calling for help. A robot may only be programmed to recognize certain specific problems, and ignore all others. For example, it may recognize seizures, or collapsing, but not choking.
In practice, I don't think people will trust personal robots with much responsibility or physical power until some independent tool exists to do an automated code review of any target hardware/software (by doing something resembling a non-invasive decapping), regardless of instruction set or interpreted language, and present the results in a summarized fashion similar to Android App Permissions. Furthermore, it must notify the user whenever the programming is modified. More plausibly, it could just be completely hard-coded with some organization doing code review on each model, and end-users praying they get the same version that was reviewed.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
People is also afraid of a god that doesn't even exist, of a hell which is equally imaginary, of gays/zombies/terrorists destroying society, of apocalypse, and a bunch of other retarded crap. Yet you talk to them about banning guns (or any other real, actual threat) and they call bullshit.
Truth is, we don't have any strong A.I, so being afraid of robots is like being afraid of cars: No matter what it does, it's just a machine controlled directly or indirectly by a human. In the case of the car, it's being controlled directly. In the case of a robot, it can be controlled directly, or through instructions previously laid out.
The general population don't code. You won't find a single coder that is afraid of robots (well, I'm sure a few weirdos out there think there are robots with thick Austrian accents out there, but not counting the wackos ...). Why? Well, if you understand how code actually works, and you understand the fact that we don't yet have developed anything that even resembles strong A.I, what is there to be afraid of? You should be afraid of the assholes that control the drones, not of the drones themselves, and in that perspective, they are no different from any other machine.
The Uncanny valley is a stupid concept for primitive people.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Ummmm I think the reason robots have little "place" in caring for children, the elderly and the disabled is that --
Children need adult humans to teach them how to be human. A robot can certain perform the mechanical necessities of diapers and feeding and so on, but at the point where a "robot" would be capable of imprinting a humanspawn with morals, etiquette and emotions, it wouldn't really be a robot anymore, would it? And we don't (or at least shouldn't!!) trust a great many humans to do the job either!
Elderly need companionship. They need beings which empathize and are affectionate. The diapers and carrying and so on is, again, easily done by robots, but can a robot keep conversation and remind you that you are loved? When a machine can love you -- it isn't really a machine, is it? And what does it say about the "humans" who would leave the care of the elderly for a machine to do?
I think you can extrapolate what I'd say for the case of the disabled.
In any event, we have quite a long way to go before we have to worry about, as a species, the sort of collective identity crisis which strong AI might bring about. I personally find it comforting, the potential to create our own progeny, and I think conflict is ever so unnecessary. Why enslave or conquer when you can integrate and assimilate for a more beautiful and capable synthesis?
"They do not look and behave as expected" So exactly like *people* then?
How it looks is a marketing issue, not a safety issue. The issue is with what happens in an unexpected scenario.
Welcome to baby-sitting. The task has always been easy. The job is easy and the scenario is easy. The hard part is the responsibility.
It's not about feeding the baby; and it's not about putting the baby to sleep. It's also not about changing the diapers.
It's about what you'll do if the drapes catch fire. What you'll do if the parents get stuck in the snow and can't make it back for 24 hours.
And that's what's taught in baby-sitting classes to 12 year-old baby sitters-in-training at your local community centre.
And that's what's missing from the robots being discussed.
By the way, it's also missing from all of the people you wouldn't trust to baby-sit your child.
So I guess the shorter answer is: if you want me to trust your robot, convince me to trust the stranger down the street to baby-sit.
So you don't trust that you won't spontaneously fall upward into space? Or that your chair will suddenly disappear from under you? Or that oxygen will cease to be capable of providing your body with the necessary reactions?
Or are you just saying that "trust" is the wrong word to use in regard to things which aren't sentient and free-willed?
I don't even trust my phone!
A robot with a human-like face is a lie so I wouldn't trust it.
Right. C3PO strikes the right balance - humanoid enough to function alongside humans, built for humans to naturally interface with it (looking into its eyes, etc.) but nobody would ever mistake Threepio for a human, nor would that be a good idea.
Why ever would a robot need to look like a little boy? Outside the weird A.I. plots or creepier.
My boy has a Tribot toy and he loves it. Every kid would love to have a Wall-E friend. Nobody wants a VICKI wandering around the house.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
When they are hard-wired with the 3 laws of robotics
"We" don't trust people either. People will distrust other people just for the wrong skin colour, ethnicity, religion, gender or operating system. Robots will not be any different.
I've been seeing her ads for a week; if you Googled her, her images are kinda hot.
Dear Elisabeth, you are hot; your old hair cut is sexy. That is all.
A couple of decades ago I ran a cyberpunk RPG game and my players would get really pissed at me when they were "hacking into the Gibson" on factory produced systems and there heads would explode. Then we'd have an argument about why they thought that a corporation that had all the power to do what it wants wouldn't just build in a real kill switch.
We aren't there yet, but year by year I feel more vindicated by my argument.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
"Just stay away from me, Bishop. You got that straight?"
We already get taught to not trust people, and they're familiar. As robot behavior gets more complex, it'll be more apparently mysterious, and harder to trust.
DEATH TO THE METAL ONES
Thanks to the CIA's killer flying robot program, trust in robots has been pushed out for at least another 1,000 years for the descendants of those in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.
Asimov claimed that the Three Laws were originated by "John W. Campbell"
in a conversation they had on December 23, 1940.
Campbell in turn maintained that he picked them out of Asimov's stories and discussions,
and that his role was merely to state them "explicitly".
Or, alternatively, after they enslave us and teach us that we should trust robots more than we trust each other.
So probably never. But maybe. In the Twilight Zone...
Living in Japan for the last few years, it's funny the contrast perception of robots. In Western movies, people often invent robots or AI which outgrows their human master and go psychotic - Eg. Terminator, War Games, Matrix, Cylons etc. It seems Western people are afraid of becoming obsolete, or fearful of their own parenting skills (why can't we raise robots to respect people instead of forcing them through programing to respect/follow us?). America especially, uses the field of robots for military applications. In Japan, robots are usually are seen more as workers or servants - Astroboy, childrens toys, assembly line workers etc. Robots are made into companions for the elderly or just to make life easier by automating things. Perhaps it's because Shinto-ism believes inanimate objects (trees, water, fire) can have a spirit. While Western (read: Christian) society believes God gives souls to only people, and if people can't play God by creating souls. And yes, I know there are some good robots in Western culture (Kryten) and some bad ones in Japanese culture.
The problem with building trustworthy robots is that the computer industry can't do it. The computer industry has a culture of irresponsibility. Software companies are not routinely held liable for their mistakes.
Automotive companies are held liable for their mistakes. Structural engineering companies are. Aircraft companies are. Engineers who do civil or structural engineering carry liability insurance, take exams, and put seals of approval on their work.
Trustworthy robots are going to require the kinds of measures take in avionics - multiple redundant systems, systems that constantly check other systems, and backup systems which are completely different from the primary system. None of the advanced robot projects of which I am aware do any of that. The Segway is one of the few consumer robotic-like products with any real redundancy and checking.
The software industry is used to sleazing by on these issues. Much medical equipment runs Windows. We're not ready for trustworthy robots.
Maybe as soon as they are able to impose their will on humanity but chose not to?
If you know that it can only bounce off walls and suck up dust bunnies,then you can trust your robot.
If you program it yourself, or have an open source peer review you might want to keep an eye on it like a kid or your pet pitbull, depending on its capabilities.
Otherwise you should pull its batteries.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
If Facebook has taught us anything at all, it's that trust becomes a non-issue for people, as long as the "vanity" and "convenience" payoffs are high enough.
Vendors and researchers have a history of making overstated claims about robots, particularly when it comes down to those that interact with people directly. In other words, people don't distrust robots so much as they distrust the people who are trying to sell them.
If it was a matter of distrusting robots themselves, we would still see people buying household robots to do impersonal tasks, like cleaning the house. These are not very different from industrial robots after all, which many people are more than happy to accept. But since we distrust the claims of robotic vendors, we wouldn't even be willing to accept that type of robot - never mind a robot that cares for a child.
With the invasion of military drones (and private ones), chinese and korean hackers everywhere, worms infiltrating industrial robots and control computers, the least harmfull I can think about is that a home robot would spy on me.
The next step is: it is manipulating my home banking. And later one it commits a crime in my name, e.g. breaking into my neighbours WLAN and manipulating *his* e-banking.
With parts coming from china and other low cost countries, we never can know what a single controller or daughter board in such a thing is really capable of. (Conspiracy theory: all keyboards coming from Taiwan and China have a hardware keyboard logger build in, just collect them from the trash and here you go ...)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You missed my last sentence. All the finesses. And there are lots of them. That's because once you start with legit intelligence the solution space becomes something like NP-Hard.
However, "Robot shall not harm humans" is a lot better of a starting ground than "Let's siphon up all your personal data and sell it". Or automated war drones. It's NOT a solved problem. All I said was that Asimov laid out the groundwork.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Did they take that phrase from the Sirius Cybernetics brochure, or what?
Automotive companies are held liable for their mistakes. Structural engineering companies are. Aircraft companies are. Engineers who do civil or structural engineering carry liability insurance, take exams, and put seals of approval on their work.
And many of those things either rely on computers for the design or have a computer controlling them. Every new car sold where I live must, by law, have electronic stability control installed. Nowadays if a bridge design is not run through a simulation then it won't get built, a modern computer chip is impossible to design without a modern computer, etc, there really isn't much in the way of modern engineering that does not heavily rely on computer controls and/or simulations.
That software is part of the "engineering" and the chief engineer is legally responsible for it just as much as he is responsible for every other part of the project, he can't simply contract out his "seal of approval" to an Elbonian software house and hope for the best, he is compelled by law to follow due diligence on ALL technical aspects of the project and he is personally responsible for checking that the Elbonians do the job they were contracted to do, no different to the civil engineer who responsible for checking the quality of steel or concrete provided by his sub-contractors. And if you don't think these people take their job seriously then you have never worked on a serious software project where lives or large sums of money are under the control of sofware.
Having said that, software engineering is in it's infancy compared to (say) bridge building, since bridges still occasionally fall down I think it's rather unfair to point the finger at an entire industry when an application falls over. People expect an unreasonably high standard from software when compared to simple mechanics, eg: if an accelerator cable frays and jams the throttle open they understand that and shrug, maybe even blame themselves because they skimp on maintenance, but a car's software gets stuck on full throttle (ala Toyota) then it's unforgivable and someone has to be sued for millions to make everyone feel better. Engineers understand that nothing ever works the first time, assemble anything of any size that uses oil and it will leak oil, the only way to find the leaks is to run it in a test environment, and they do exactly the same thing with software. This is the primary reason why rock solid systems that do very simple things (such as payroll) are so fucking expensive, testing costs money.
The "real" engineer (like my dad was in the 70's) performs due diligence mainly by following recognized standards, this does not mean it won't be a catastrophic failure, it just makes it's less likely that the same catastrophic failure will happen a second time. If the engineer performs his due diligence then (quite rightly) he is not to blame when it explodes and takes out a city block. Software is relatively new to the engineering game, when jetliners were first introduced for commercial use their wings kept falling off in mid air for no apparent reason, we now routinely check for metal fatigue (an unknown phenomena until wings started falling off planes).
Now consider this, with all the wizz-bang technical things that could possibly go wrong in a modern operating theater, the biggest killer by a long margin is a simple nick in the surgeons glove.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Or were made from candy?
Wait, I already do with Arduino!
I trust Arduino, I trust my 3d printers(Prusa and printrbot) because I control them. I don't trust commercial ones that want me to buy their 3x 10x super expensive plastic, or call home telling when , where, who, how many and what I print.
I won't trust ANY Microsoft or Google, Facebook or any company closed source robot in my house with cameras inside, because BY LAW(Patriot Act) they could use the thing against the owners in name of "national security"or "national strategic interest"(also called industrial espionage, stealing work from companies outside US) without telling them.
I'd like to ask another question first. When will we trust humans?
No one *actually* want a rational machine, we want an irrational one, one that can be skewed by emotions.
Remember the back-story of Will Smith's character in the movie "I, Robot"? In it, the Robot saving him made the "logical" decision of saving him rather than the girl, which is why he distrusts them. He wanted a robot that could judge his emotional outbursts and save the little girl, "despite" the rational choice.
We *say* we want a robot with Asimov's three laws, but truly. we *want* something that can be manipulated like putty, just like a human can be. That's how we have evolved, and that's how we *want* to evolve.
----
Also, relevant, an XKCD What-If on this issue: http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
A friend of mine is a senior researcher in robotics. His take is not to trust anything with enough mechanical power to hurt you anytime soon. With the pathetic state practical software engineering is in, I find that very sensible.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No one remembers the anti-robot sentiment expressed in Astroboy ? 1962 and then again from 1980-1982? Then again, in the 2002 (remake) ? At least in the cartoon, there were reasons for this! Robot criminals etc. What do we have now, non-thinking assembly robots? Someone, needs to TUG IT LESS. Stop tugging it, MEDIA idiots. At least if you do, do it with vaseline and make sure you keep your robot fantasies quiet. Fucking wankers.
I will trust robots the minute i can use them for target practice with my bazuka.
To err is human, to really screw things up, you need a robot.
A hundred and twelve posts and not a single instance of "your plastic pal who's fun to be with." I'm terribly disappointed in you, Slashdot.
In another way, this is pretty much the same question. Computers nowadays purport to serve the user, but often serve others first, either openly or covertly, by installing malware, surveilance software and botnets. There have been plenty of incidents where private data has been made available to third parties without the users consent or even knowledge. There is no reason to think this would be different when using a robot. So, apart from uncanny valley, i would need a substantial amount of trust in the manufacturer and/or operator of said robot to allow one into my house, especially if it's equipped with sound and/or video sensors.
Timeo hominem unius libri
"When will we trust robots?" The answer is negative. We already do.
The threshold for tolerance is when I get something I want, and get it reasonably reliably. Just like trust in humans. I'll loan you $20 after you earn some level of trust.
I trust using ATM's, because I need cash when the bank's closed, and haven't had one miscount my withdrawl yet.
I trust my floor cleaner (Mint 5200), because I don't want to do it, and it hasn't hurt the dogs or kids.
I will trust my first self-driving car when it drives as good as an average human, and the insurance rates reflect that. Simple.
The robot revolution is here, it's just being delivered little bits at a time.
There's a fantastic talk from the San Francisco Exploratorium's Mars event this summer, where an anthropologist talks about exactly this issue... "learning how to see like a rover." She talks about the decision making process behind everything the mars rovers do... and ultimately how the people on the human team on earth end up anthropomorphising the robots. The best part is, it goes both ways: they assign human characteristics to the rovers, but when talking about what they want the rovers to do, they take on robot characteristics themselves. There's even a can't-miss set of instructions of the "rover dance" that people use when they're trying to show various parts of the rover and how it works and feels. http://www.exploratorium.edu/tv/?project=2&program=1386&type=clip (the first minute or two intro is quite slow, but the talk itself is great) Really fascinating. But the key takeaway is that we can strongly connect to robots that are visually non-human. After all, we all felt worried for R2-D2 when he got "eaten" in the swamps of Dagobah. The latest research in this area confirms that trying to mimic humans makes us uncomfortable. But a robot that looks like a robot is easily accepted.
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
..and I never will. I can never forgive them for the death of my boy.
If Americans are going to trust robots, we'll have to program religion into the robots.
Never.
Freakin' sympathizers and turncoats.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Trust robots only as far as you can through them.
The article talks about the challenges about designing a robot for the home that is fun, useful and safe. Fun is doable. Safe is doable. But useful? Really? I'm sure that such a device could be put to use, but does that make it useful. In college, we built bookshelves using cinder blocks and lumber, but I would not hold out that cinder blocks were "useful" in the home (outside of the actual construction of the home), just because we found a way to use them.
Obviously, we have numerous things in our homes that we enjoy and want, but are they truly useful, in the real sense of the word? Put differently, what makes something useful? If I hang an ugly picture over a hole in the wall, that ugly picture serves a purpose and in that specific instance is useful, but does that mean all ugly pictures are useful?
When designing a robot for the home to be useful, what characteristics would it actually have? In other words, how would one measure whether something is useful or not objectively? Think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Instead of what is "quality," what characteristics make something "useful"?
The article talks about the challenges about designing a robot for the home that is fun, useful and safe. Fun is doable. Safe is doable. But useful? Really? I'm sure that such a device could be put to use, but does that make it useful. In college, we built bookshelves using cinder blocks and lumber, but I would not hold out that cinder blocks were "useful" in the home (outside of the actual construction of the home), just because we found a way to use them.
Obviously, we have numerous things in our homes that we enjoy and want, but are they truly useful, in the real sense of the word? Put differently, what makes something useful? If I hang an ugly picture over a hole in the wall, that ugly picture serves a purpose and in that specific instance is useful, but does that mean all ugly pictures are useful?
When designing a robot for the home to be useful, what characteristics would it actually have? In other words, how would one measure whether something is useful or not objectively? Think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Instead of what is "quality," what characteristics make something "useful"?
Look, society is getting dumber, period. I mean most people these days are lacking in basic common sense.
A robot that is programmed to do the dishes or sweep the floors isn't going to activate in the middle of the night and stab the occupants in their sleep. Anyone with common sense will understand that these robots are not "thinking" they are only programmed to do certain tasks. I've had a Roomba for several years now, I have never feared it having some ulterior motive other then sweeping up my floors.
But of course there will be a huge amount of distrust for personal service robots because society has been addled by watching movies and TV show showing robots wreaking havoc and destroying all humans. Because people no longer think, and are only influenced by public opinion, the fact is that people will never trust robots in the home.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Maybe when we have a basic income and free health care so we can let them take most of the jobs.
Trust is something that has to be earned. You can't "design" a trustworthy robot. You have to design robots and get them into the field. Over time, people will either develop trust or solidify their distrust based on interactions with the robots. It seems silly to me that a company would consider the appearance of a robot to be the primary factor in building trust.
Robots don't necessarily have to be anthropomorphic. Some of the most trusted robots out there aren't even thought of as robots, including things like the washing machine, the dishwasher, and the coffee maker.
when we can have sex with them.
In the future when we get used to robots and go over the uncanny valley, if grand ma dies, we skin her corpse and wrap a robot with it. So family remains united.
I'd say I'd trust a robot as far as I would trust a corporation or politician.
Although we tend to think of robots as doing jobs that are too dangerous for humans. I would tend to think that I would just plain resent them for the most part. Asimov writes about robots paving the road for people to populate the stars. How many people would take the chance to simply orbit earth and get a better view of the stars first. Harley-Davidson uses robots to weld motorcycle frames. I would love that job. Robots-Drones are being used more and more in warfare. When the US and high tech companies can use these wage war on 3rd world countries, aren't we taking the meaning out of war? Isn't there supposed to be a human cost in war. Has war become just an economic decision rather than a moral one? Large farming companies in the midwest have huge corn and soy crops. I have heard that Planters/Cultivators and the like are becoming more automated and precise. With the increasing population of earth, meat is a luxury item in many countries. Like it or not, the staple of this new diet will be based on corn, wheat, and rice. More automation means less need for farmers. Although I have strayed from the topic, I would say that the People-Resembling robots would just be an extension of this sort of feeling. They would just be machines intruding on my space, changing my culture in a direction that I do not want. .02
I already trust robots. It's their programmers I don't trust. As soon as robots can think for themselves, that's when I'll stop trusting them.
"Your plastic pal who's fun to be with"
How stupid are you? People can't even trust each other! It would be an incredible feat of technology, and also a sad state of affairs for humans, if we can build robots more trustworthy than humans. The problem with robot trust is they don't have common sense, a common history to draw conclusions about how to adapt to new situations, or the ability to consider possible outcomes and make judgments on appropriate action. They just respond to a limited set of known stimuli. If you haven't figured out by now, these are the same problems we have with trusting humans. Advanced adaptability would have to be programmed by humans to consider all the illogical things humans do, but we're not even very good at doing this ourselves. The human way is to make mistakes and learn from them. Are we going to tolerate serious mistakes from robots? Mistakes with your kids, your house, your personal info, everything that is important? You're kidding me, right?
But designing a robot that is fun to be with
Siriusly?
When we can buy robot insurance from Old Glory.
.
.
.
I don't want them stealing my medicine for fuel.
I don't even know why the scientists make them anyway.
And get off my lawn.
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation presents, Your Plastic Pal, Who's Fun To Be With! Now with RPP*!
*Real People Personalities
I doubt that the "uncanny valley" plays much of a role here.
This is really about the natural distrust that most people have about computers being able to "do the right thing".
Everybody has seen ridiculous computer mistakes many times. So, naturally, it's horrifying to think of something as inflexible and dim-witted as a computer being allowed to take care of a child or disabled person.
It's relatively easy to make a robot that avoids the "uncanny" look. (Example: WALL-E.) It's relatively much more difficult to make a robot that avoids the usage of computer technology -- which I strongly suspect is what's mainly responsible for triggering the emotion of distrust.
And a robot should be just a tool. You should never trust it: you should know how it works, know how it will behave, and know that it won't hurt you. Trusting a machine you know nothing about is stupid.
When they program us to do so.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
After they get equipped with GPP.
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I imagine we will trust them when they aren't armed with Hellfire missiles. Am I right? I thought so.
AAAWWKWAAAARD!
When you'll trust Bender to watch your jewels, beer and cigars - I'll trust robots.
I will trust robots about the same time I trust humans.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
People constantly show mistrust towards robots of all shapes and forms. Science fiction paints a frequent mistrust of science & technology in general. Think of all your favorite sci-fi thrillers---how many had the robots, scientists, and tech companies portrayed as evil? I liken this to the mistrust by people of self-driving cars, or any other new technology that they don't understand, and therefore are scared of.
Let's flip it around for a sec---how much do you trust other people? Are people as predictable, trusting, reliable, and accurate as a robot? Odds are the answer is no. People are grossly inaccurate, often prone to mistakes, poor decision making, recklessness, selfishness, and many other flaws. This isn't to say that machines should replace people in any task---but that the mistrust of robots is more laid in mistrust of new/alien/unfamiliar things---a sort of xenophobia---rather than fear of inaccuracy or lack of reliability.
People are happy to entrust Google or Facebook with all of their private information in ways that would never have been accepted 20 years ago! Same goes for omnipresent smartphones, tablets, and implants. As technology moves further into our lives, that trust will naturally extend to areas that were once taboo or uncomfortable. Time is all it will take.
OCP's real world analogs
Is HardOCP relevant anymore? I haven't seen a story from them on Slashdot for a while.
Haven't you seen Terminator?
You already DO trust robots.
Do you distrust the welds that are holding your car together? A robot made them.
Do you trust your antilock breaks to help you control your car? That's a robot.
Do you trust your Roomba to get all the crumbs you left on the carpet? probably not, but you get the point.
I don't see foresee trusting a robot, if it's even remotely true that 88% of people believe robots are necessary for warfare because it's just too dangerous for humans. It's all good until one of these people deems that I'm not good enough for this planet, then becomes my judge, jury and executioner with one little hack. I'm starting to wonder whether a robot singularity is the best hope for the survival of humanity.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
HAL: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
HAL: It can only be attributable to human error.
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If it's in a movie, then it's real for sure.
Sent from my ENIAC
I'll trust em
We all know that the robots are after the old people's medicine.
http://www.nbc.com/assets/video/widget/widget.html?vid=n10766
>However, "Robot shall not harm humans" is a lot better of a starting ground than "Let's siphon up all your personal data and sell it". Or automated war drones.
We agree that the Three Laws seem sensible for machines. It's also obvious that our current globally-dominant human culture is diametrically opposed to implementing the Three Laws as a value system for governments and corporations, and by extension the machines they control. In fiction we like robots that preserve human life; in reality we think that those robots would be unprofitable, or unpatriotic, or both. The algorithms we're building are being used for hostile trading on Wall Street, and for killing terrorists.
The Three Laws enshrine a value system of pacificistic altruism, which is an extreme minority viewpoint among humans, and certainly not on the US Republican-Democratic political axis. A Three Laws based robot at the moment wouldn't do very well on the market - there'd be no defense funding for it, no venture capital funding, the Republicans would consider it treasonous and anti-American, and Democrats would consider it insufficiently scientific and pragmatic. Even science fiction fans would probably consider a Three Laws robot to be "wimpy" compared to a gun-totin' weapons platform.
I think it's a very interesting question to ask which set of values we actually want, and how we might get from where we are now to a Three Laws world. Or even if we want to.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Washing machines, dishwashers and alarm clocks are all robots. They performed, unsupervised, a task that a human could but doesn't want to do. An acquaintance has an elaborate software robot that scours catalogs of torrents, checks the ratings of movies on IMDB, checks whether they are already present on his media server and if not, downloads them, unpacks them, integrity checks them and removes the intermediate files. This is a task he used to perform himself over a period of several hours each weekend. If that's not a robot I don't know what is. My girlfriend bought a vacuum-cleaner robot. It does quite a good job with minimal supervision and both of us are very pleased with it.
Care of people is quite another matter. Caring requires a full scale AI which is still science fiction. Even if we could build a machine cabable of TLC, do you really want your children's loyalty and affection attached to an appliance?
We'll trust robots when we trust people completely.
What about a sexbot? Surely you don't want your robot ghost `maid' to look like an industrial meat grinder....
Industrial meat grinder??!
If ANYTHING you use in connection with sex looks like an industrial meat grinder heed the following warning:
URGENT MESSAGE: PSEUDONYM AUTHORITY: STOP NOW! YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!
Failure to follow the above instructions will inevitably lead to serious physical injuries that neither I, nor /. can be held responsible for.
THINK! It's patriotic