Full Text: Oy, Robot!

Henrik Hautop Lund

Professor at the University of Southern Denmark's Adaptronics Group, and former head of the LEGO Lab

Rodney Brooks

Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founder and chief technical officer of iRobot.

Resolved: In the next century, robots will take over the planet.

Lund: I cannot imagine such a scenario with robots taking over the planet. In robotic research, we are very far from the intelligent autonomous robots known from science fiction. On the other hand, I see a lot of spin-offs from robot development that will make a huge impact on our daily life in future. Indeed, I believe that we as robot scientists and developers have a responsibility to develop robot technology into some sensible application of high social value. Here I am thinking of the European tradition of looking at edutainment robotics, neuroscience and robotic prostheses, etc. whereas I see an American robotic community to a large degree guided by the military and its funding schemes. I think that this will guide the robot developments that we make, and I would myself opt for the developments that can have a clear social impact. For instance, in my university lab and my Entertainment Robotics company, we are currently developing robotic spin-offs for teaching creativity in developing countries in Africa, for rehabilitation of elderly with dementia (together with University of Siena), for physiotherapy (together with Funen Hospital), for playware to fight the obesity problem together with Europe's largest producer of playgrounds KOMPAN (and Danish University of Education), and so forth. I think that we as some of the influential experts in the field have a responsibility to guide the development of the future, but I see a lot of American robotic development being guided by other incentives, such as the military funding.

Brooks: I think it all depends on what we mean by "take over" and "planet."

If we mean "take over" in the Hollywood sense of the robots getting impatient with us humans making bad decisions, feeling like we are not giving them their due, and deciding that we are redundant (hmmm, reminds me of my teenagers…) and that their world will be better off without us, then I agree--we are not going to see that, despite all the movies we have seen. "But I've seen it in so many movies"--well in real life we're not always seeing ghosts, fighting aliens, or driving flying cars, all of which are staples of Hollywood predictions. Nor will we see the robots rise up against us.

However, compared to when I was born in 1954, I think computers have "taken over" our lives in the western world, and even, but less unpleasantly, the third world. When I was born there were hardly any computers in the world, and none at all in the city of more than half a million (at the time) where I first saw light (and there were no other cities at all within 500 miles). Now when I am out of the house I always have pockets full of microprocesors in the form of two telephones, one GSM and one WiFi, that will route voice messages to me from anywhere in the world at any instant. When I drive my eight year old car most of what I do in the control sense is modulated by embedded microprocessors, especially the brakes, fortunately, as I live on a very icy street. The radio that plays in my car is packed with microprocessors, handling the audio data digitally. And in my breast pocket at all times are two tiny little 1GB memory sticks each with a microprocessor in them. In my house and at work I am surrounded by computers--some unnetworked such as the ones running my bedside clock, by fridge, and my coffee machine, and many networked, such as the ones in my phones, in the WiFi repeaters, in my cable TV set top box, and the six laptops that every member of my family (except the dogs) use most hours of the day. The computers have taken over my life. I spend my day interacting with them. And when I was in Mumbai last week I saw day laborers working in completely traditional ways with woven baskets for digging soil and transporting rocks across the worksite, but reaching into their sarees to take telephone calls--computer driven and mediated communication.

Computers have taken over our planet in a mere fifty years.

Robots will do the same.

And now to "planet." Which planet exactly? Henrik is a little behind the times on understanding U.S. funding--in the large scale computer science and artificial intelligence lab that I direct, with 93 faculty members, 470 graduate students, and another 270 staff and visitors, we were funded over 90% by the defense department ten years ago. Today that number is less than 25%. In my own little research group we are completely funded by a Japanese company, a European company, and NASA.