Robots are efficient workers who don’t get bored, don’t ask for a pay rise and don’t want your job. Or do they? Sue Nelson reports
Does the future belong to humans or machines? Science fiction usually portrays robots as inheriting the Earth but, in contrast to these ominous forecasts, most scientists predict mutual and helpful co- existence.
Think of C3PO in Star Wars or the whisky- distilling Robbie in Forbidden Planet, and put all thoughts of the Terminator aside. For now, in laboratories around the world, there’s a whole new generation of civilised cyborgs waiting to serve us in the best way they can.
Robodoc is a machine that prepares the cavity in the human thigh bone for hip- replacement surgery, and is currently undergoing clinical trials in Europe and the United States. David Simon, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in Pennsylvania, is convinced of the benefits. “Robots are extremely accurate: they’re fast and they can cancel tremors in a surgeon’s hand,” he says.
Carnegie Mellon specialises in the practical end of a 20th-century science. Robots are favoured over biological creatures for tolerating radiation, cold, a vacuum, toxins and the pressures of the deep sea.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also interested in oceans. Robotuna is part of a project to develop autonomous underwater vehicles to find sources of underwater pollution. It is permanently attached to the laboratory, but John Kumpf is currently working on a free-swimming version, Robopike.
Kumpf believes all kinds of robotic creatures will explore the ocean and send back information. There’d be Robolobster sifting through the sand looking for gold, Robopikes swimming around the reef monitoring coral and Robotunas looking for vents.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Whittaker sets his sights even higher. “I see machines that will build for us, prepare our way, exploit the resources and fulfil our ambitions as our agents in space,” he says.
This echoes the original Czech meaning of the word robot – slave labour. The film Robocop took this notion one step further. According to Martin Smith, at the University of East London, this is no longer science fiction.
His team has built a robotic warehouse security guard called Victoria: a fleshless, 1,8m-high metal skeleton with piercing red pupils. “It has two TV cameras for eyes and two lasers to give us the range finding. It also has infrared detectors and a small radar to detect humans.”
Robots such as Victoria simply do what they’re programmed to do. But these rules don’t apply at the University of Reading’s Cybernetics Department, which has developed the seven dwarfs, a group of miniaturised three-wheeled robots with the capacity to learn through trial and error. As a result, they display all kinds of behaviour, such as flocking with the rest of the group or following a leader.
The next step will be creating machines that can think for themselves and, if humans are to feel comfortable interacting with these intelligent robots, that will need to understand and show emotions.
Justine Cassell, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working towards this goal with Gandolf, a virtual robot that can detect body language and gesture. When Cassell, wearing a wired jacket and virtual reality headset, puts up her hand, for example, Gandolf interprets her action as a signal that she wants to talk, and becomes quiet. The reaction is not programmed, insists Cassell, but it is not learnt automatically either.
John Clute, a science fiction critic, sees the quest to make robots more like ourselves as part of the human condition. We need pets. We need companions. We need that sort of relationship.
But Kevin Warwick, at the University of Reading, turns that idea on its head. Warwick thinks we are more likely to end up as robots’ pets. His forthcoming book, The March of the Machines, predicts a terrifying The Terminator scenario that ends the human race.
“If you think of anything with a comparable intelligence to ours, it’s very worrying,” he says. “No longer can you order it around or control it because it will decide it doesn’t want to be ordered around, it doesn’t want to be controlled. So if robots are very much more intelligent than us… “
If they are, let’s just hope they like us.