For Discover Magazine’s 30th anniversary, they’re posting a series of predictions from eminent scientists about what’s going to happen over the next 30 years. One of these scientists is Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics at MIT and CTO of iRobot, and he’s got some interesting things to say (besides the all too familiar “robots right now are like computers in the 80s”):

One of the great things about the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which my company iRobot designed, is that it’s too cheap not to be autonomous. Military robots right now are too expensive to be autonomous—you can’t afford to have them screw up. If the Roomba misses a spot, no big deal, it can find it later. So there will be a lot more robot autonomy, but surprisingly it will start out at the low end. It will trickle up to the high end over time.

Too cheap not to be autonomous… The ‘trickle up’ idea for robotics isn’t something I’ve heard people talk about much. The conventional way of thinking is that expensive and complex robots with expensive and complex sensors will provide the origins of autonomy, and then as the hardware gets cheaper and more accessible, robots offering the same autonomous capabilities will also get cheaper and more accessible. After all, this is what happens with computers. Brooks is right, though, in that to some extent, the more expensive a robot is, the less likely we are to trust it entirely to itself. In order for true autonomy to trickle up from the bottom, however, we’re going to have to overcome the hardware limitations and start getting access to more technology like the $25 SLAM system in the Neato XV-11.

Cars will certainly be more robotic. There will be many more robots in our houses, in our hospitals, in our factories, and in the military. We don’t have armed robot soldiers yet, but if we did, a robot could afford to shoot second, where a person could not. A robot doesn’t care whether its life is at risk. One can imagine robots getting a lot better at detecting what’s dangerous and what’s not dangerous: where there’s a gun and where there isn’t one. They might actually become more moral than we are.

I know that this is a somewhat contentious subject, but I tend to agree with Brooks here, although I’m not sure about the morality bit… Plenty of people definitely don’t agree, but I think the idea of being able to shoot second with no risk is an important advantage that robots have and humans don’t.

[ Discover ]