what is a robot exactly are these robots
how about this
surely a silvery humanoid hell bent on
destruction is a robot right
the thing is it's actually really hard
to define a robot much less get
roboticists to agree on a universal
definition
that may seem trivial but it has serious
implications as robots become a bigger
part of our lives so let's take a stab
at defining what a robot is
what a lot of people tend to follow is
this sense think act paradigm which is
that the machine has to be capable of
somehow sensing its environment
and then
thinking about or planning its next
action
and then somehow acting on the world
so consider a drone you pilot to pester
your neighbors
is that a robot well no it doesn't sense
its environment or think on its own it
acts but only because you tell it to
but get yourself an autonomous drone and
suddenly it's a lot more robotic
it senses and thinks and acts on its own
so the key here is intelligence
an artificial intelligence agent to me
is an agent that acts to maximize a
person's utility so robots have to
actually work together with people and
use human guidance and human oversight
to learn more about you know what people
actually want what are their values what
makes them happy so they're no longer
just the brutes that follow a series of
commands like a robot arm on a factory
floor but how have they changed exactly
what you're gonna see here is very much
work in progress but it gives us a
little bit of a glimpse into two
different definitions of robotics
okay so now the robot is moving and i'm
unhappy with it because it's keeping
this too far away from the ground from
the table so what i'm gonna do is i'm
gonna push on it a little bit
but it just keeps on going back because
its utility says that it should stay far
away from the table so no matter what i
do
well it lets me deform it but it just
goes right back to stubbornly doing it
the way it thinks is the optimal way to
do the task
so now this is a robot that tries to
optimize what i want and tries to figure
out what it is that that i want and so
when i pushed it down it actually
understood that okay i must have not
been doing the task right to begin with
the stubborn robot is a traditional
robot and the one that's sensitive to
human needs is a new breed
but why worry so much about semantics
here because robot is a loaded word
so i think robotics definitely has a pr
problem
it can be kind of a double-edged sword
in some ways because the word robot just
generates a lot of attention and
fascination and sometimes fear so you
can use it to get people's attention or
to make people pay attention to your
product i mean it's much sexier to call
something a robot than call something a
dishwasher at the same time robot is
still a dirty word of sorts especially
with all this talk of machines stealing
jobs and the rise of artificial
intelligence could put even more people
out of work in the coming decades but is
ai a robot no not on its own a robot is
a physical thing and that gets tricky
with something like a robot tax meaning
steal a human job pay a fee i've heard
from people like bill gates you know
robots should be taxed okay well what is
a robot you know
are your software products that you
disrupted labor markets with also robots
or is it is a robot something physical
um so i think as as we start to discuss
the policy implications we're going to
need more
definitional work
robots come in different kinds and we
have to be careful about which kind we
mean when we brand something and when we
formally define the problem that we're
working on so that we can be clear about
what it is that we're trying to achieve
in the end the machines are here to stay
so we better get to know them
just be careful who you call a robot