Archive | Robotics

Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who studies human- robot psychological and social interactions.  She has been documenting and studying the attitudes of humans toward having emotional relationships and affective interactions with robots over time, and notes a gradual shift toward seeing such interactions favorably.  She recently presented at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings; it was covered by LiveScience (Clara Moskowitz, Human Robot Relations: Why We Should Worry, LifeScience 18 February 2013, HT Insta).  LiveScience is a popularizer of science, of course, and Turkle’s academic research is sober and restrained, and much more sophisticated than a general interest site can easily convey, but the article captures well some important points.  First, attitudes are in fact shifting in the United States:

Turkle studies people’s thoughts and feelings about robots, and has found a culture shift over time. Where subjects in her studies used to say, in the 1980s and ’90s, that love and friendship are connections that can occur only between humans, people now often say robots could fill these roles …

Turkle interviewed a teenage boy in 1983, asking him whom he would turn to, to talk about dating problems. The boy said he would talk to his dad, but wouldn’t consider talking to a robot, because machines could never truly understand human relationships.  In 2008, Turkle interviewed another boy of the same age, from the same neighborhood as the first. This time, the boy said he would prefer to talk to a robot, which could be programmed with a large database of knowledge about relationship patterns, rather than talk to his dad, who might give bad advice.

Turkle is particularly well-known within the specialist community, however, for her concern that increasingly positive feelings toward machines as companions and replacements for human interaction is [...]

VC readers, being eclectic polymaths, are likely to heard of the “Uncanny Valley” – the hypothesis advanced by roboticist Masahiro Mori that a “person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley.” Mori’s article appeared more than 40 years in an obscure journal in Japan called Energy, but was never widely available in complete form in English.  Last year, Automaton, IEEE/Spectrum’s robotics blog, published a complete translation of the article.  I had never read it in full, and I thought it might interest VC readers.  The notion of the Uncanny Valley has taken on greater importance as robots are gradually being developed that are intended to have greater human-machine interaction.  And the article is important in its own right as part of the intellectual history of science and technology.  Here is the editor’s introduction, from which the above quote is taken:

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal calledEnergy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention. More recently, however, the concept of the uncanny valley has rapidly attracted interest in robotics and other scientific circles as well as in popular culture. Some researchers have explored its implications for human-robot interaction and computer-graphics animation, while others have investigated

In my earlier posts comparing self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems, I pointed out that in neither case are we seeing a sudden, systemic paradigm change, a shift from one whole technological system to another.  Not, at least, in the sense that I had long assumed – that a change-over to driverless cars would require necessarily a systemic change from individuals driving their individual cars to a centralized computer system dealing with all the vehicles in the system as a whole system – including things like sensors in the roads, no commingling of system-controlled cars with individually-controlled cars, etc.

Instead, the changes in these particular technologies are occurring incrementally.  It might be different for other technologies, but for these, it so happens that the changes are taking place bit by bit.  Cars are being sold one-by-one that are gradually incorporating more and more of these automatic systems, as safety and convenience features.  This fact alters the nature of the legal, ethical, and policy review that has to be made of the systems – regulatory review, too, has to be incremental.  Moreover, changes toward automation often occur in highly discrete technological functions within the larger activity – braking systems in cars, or the detailed and particular criteria used for target identification in weapons, for example.  Legal, ethical, and policy decisions have to address both the particular function and its impact on the overall machine system.  In this regard, I once again highly recommend the new report by Bryant Walker Smith (Stanford Center for Internet and Society), on the legality of self-driving cars in the US. For those of us interested in weapon systems, it provides a useful basis for comparing ways in which vehicle codes will have to gradually take account of evolutionary technologies with what the legal review for automating [...]

I’m continuing my series of posts on automated vehicles (the last one was some initial thoughts on comparisons between self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems).  Today I want to recommend this January 12, 2013 NYT story, by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, on the current state of safety systems for cars in the incremental advance toward fully automated and finally self-driving vehicles.  Plus, in order to understand the regulatory and legal context in which this transformation necessarily takes place, I also highly recommend the new report by Bryant Walker Smith (Stanford Center for Internet and Society), on the legality of self-driving cars in the US. It makes a useful basis for comparing the ways in which vehicle codes will have to gradually take account of evolutionary technologies.

New York State, for example, requires in its vehicle code that drivers have one hand on the steering wheel at all times; that obviously won’t be compatible with the emergence of self-driving cars. Even Nevada (a state that has positioned itself ahead of the curve by adopting a self-driving car provision) requires that the car have a human driver who is responsible and able to take over driving.  Texting while the car drives itself is okay, in other words, but getting into the vehicle drunk and telling it to drive you home is not, because you would not be able to drive if necessary.  Yet technology will presumably alter that, and the vehicle code will presumably adapt as the technology improves, given that a core purpose of self-driving vehicles is to drive people who are incapacitated, by alcohol, but more importantly by age.  After all, Google is betting its self-driving cars on a market among elderly baby boomers who can’t (or shouldn’t) be driving.

Which goes to illustrate that a key focus [...]

(Thanks Instapundit for the link.)  Driverless cars are coming faster than most observers would have thought.  One big reason, according to Bryant Walker Smith in a recent article in Slate, is that people predicting the driverless car future assumed that they would have to be part of centrally-run systems, with corresponding changes to physical infrastructure, such as special roads embedded with magnets.  Or for that matter, we can add, centralized computers to take control of all the vehicles in the system.  The changeover has to be centralized and take place for a given area all at once; it doesn’t scale incrementally.  That was the thought, anyway, and Smith (who is a fellow at Stanford’s Center for the Internet and Society) says that as a consequence, ever “since the 1930s, self-driving cars have been just 20 years away.”

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Self-Driving Cars

Today’s self-driving systems, however, are “intended to work with existing technologies.”  They use sensors and computers to act as individual vehicles responding to the environment around them individually, without having to be a cog in the larger machine.  This means that they can adapt to the existing infrastructures rather than requiring that they all be replaced as a whole system.  Smith’s real point, however, is to go on from physical infrastructure to include the rules of the road.  Infrastructure also includes, he says,

laws that govern motor vehicles: driver licensing requirements, rules of the road, and principles of product liability, to name but a few. One major question remains, though. Will tomorrow’s cars and trucks have to adapt to today’s legal infrastructure, or will that infrastructure adapt to them?

Smith takes up the most basic of these questions – are self-driving vehicles legal in the US?  They probably can be, he says – and he should know, as the [...]

Though much of my attention goes to military drones used outside the US, the regulatory issues surrounding US domestic drones are vital and difficult.  Domestic drones of many types, sizes, and functions will become an increasingly important part of US aviation over time, and the issues are thorny.  Lawyer types like me tend to focus on privacy issues, or government surveillance, and such issues – but there are big questions long before one gets to those about how even to integrate drones into the existing domestic airspace.  The FAA has been tasked by Congress to get on with resolving the whole range of domestic drone issues.  Wells Bennett – a lawyer who is the Lawfare blog’s Special Correspondent and a Visiting Fellow in National Security Law at the Brookings Institution – has a new paper up at the Brookings website (link here at Lawfare) on how it’s coming along.  It covers:

• (1) key benchmarks set by the FAA Modernization and Authorization Act, the statute behind the integration process;
• (2) the agency’s progress to date in meeting those benchmarks; and
• (3) core policy issues that must be addressed before late 2015—the so-called “deadline” for integration of privately–as well as government-operated drones.

  [...]

Wired (H/T Instapundit) has a nice article by Daniela Hernandez on the coming of “robo-doctors.” Not  yet quite what our sci-fi imaginations desire, but still an important development on its own terms:

Charlie Huiner, the vice president of InTouch Health care … sees robo-docs rising … His company is developing robots that allow doctors to “provide their care and expertise” remotely, he said at the second day of the Wired Health Conference.  Huiner doesn’t call his robots replacement doctors. He calls them conduits of care. The robot’s patented autonomous capabilities let a flesh-and-blood doctor on the other side tell their android helper what to do. “It is as easy as tapping a point on a map or a patient room [on an iPad] and the robot will go there,” Huiner told Wired.

He showcased the company’s new ‘bot, RP-VITA, or Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant, at Wired Health with company CEO Yulun Wang teleconferencing in from another location. “It’s like the movie Avatar, but for medical applications,” Wang said, appearing on the robot’s monitor-head, which has two eye socket-like cavities. (They’re a user-controlled, eye-friendly laser pointer.) The humanoid ‘bot, which InTouch developed with Roomba-maker iRobot, also can interface with third-party apps.

This technology in effect combines remote-conduits (doctor at different location; machine with patient); locomotion (tell machine where to go and it goes there); robotic capabilities and sensors to do things like take temperature (capabilities that will presumably get more sophisticated over time); and AI capacities for assisting the remotely-located doctor to do diagnosis.

There are important roles for automation, AI, and robotics with regard to the doctor’s role in “seeing” a patient – diagnostic computers will likely become increasingly important adjuncts for the doctor.  But my guess is that most of the genuinely “robotic” activities in [...]

The Wall Street Journal has an article in its Thursday, March 15, 2012 edition titled “The Robots Are Coming to Hospitals.”  Reporter Timothy Hay explores ways in which robots are being deployed to transport linens, laundry, and other things around hospital complexes – which are, of course, often enormous facilities.  (I believe this is an open link.)  I have remarked several times here at Volokh that robotics has a natural place in health care – and, as I’ve said, even more so in nursing than in the operating theater.  (I regard it as the new “plastics.”)  The Journal article seems to agree:

In the next few years, thousands of “service robots” are expected to enter the health-care sector—picture R2D2 from “Star Wars” carrying a tray of medications or a load of laundry down hospital corridors. Fewer than 1,000 of these blue-collar robots currently roam about hospitals, but those numbers are expected to grow quickly. As America’s elderly population grows, the country’s health-care system is facing cost pressures and a shortage of doctors and nurses. Many administrators are hoping to foist some of the less glamorous work onto robots.

This could create a potential bonanza for software and application developers to write new programs for them, investors and industry watchers say. “My guess is that in five years, there will be 10 times the number of robots deployed in hospitals that there are today,” said Donald Jones, a managing director at Draper Triangle Ventures, who is backing privately held robotics company Aethon Inc. “We are just not going to have enough human hands to do all the work.”

These technologies will piggy-back off of many existing and emerging technologies; some of their first and most important roles will be adaptations of technologies developed for warehouse fulfillment centers such as those used [...]