Robots Are Like Frankenstein (Kinda)
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 25 of February , 2010 at 3:09 am
The NY Times posted an article online on Tuesday about food serving robots. We’ve already covered pretty much all of the bots in the article here on BotJunkie (like Snackbot, Motoman, Chief Cook, ramen bots, sushi hand, and that octopus balls robot)
But, there was this interesting quote:
Dr. Heather Knight, a roboticist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that the industry is trying to change “the perception of robots.”
“The Japanese have always been more comfortable with it, but particularly in the West, there’s this whole Frankenstein thing that if we try to make something in the image of man, to make a new creature, we’re stealing the role of God, and it’s going to turn out wrong because that’s not our role,” she said.
Dr. Knight goes on to suggest that having robots serve people food will get people to like robots, ’cause people like food. Maybe that’s true. I’m not entirely sure, though, about the premise that service robots in general (or perhaps humanoid service robots specifically) make people uncomfortable because of this Frankenstein effect involving humans, uh, overstepping our bounds (I guess?) when it comes to creating things. I’m inclined to believe that it’s something more straightforward: robots are foreign to our general experience, and that makes people uncomfortable. You could argue, I suppose, that this is just semantics, and that robots are foreign to us because we’re not ‘meant’ to be creating them, but I wouldn’t want to suggest that because something makes us uncomfortable there’s something inherently wrong about it. Really, it’s just a matter of education (and cultural education), and you can cite any number of historical precedents to this. Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to think about.
Dr. Knight gave at talk at Ignite LA last fall on social robotics, here’s the vid:
This brings up another interesting issue, that of trust… I feel like it might be possible to trust the current generation of robots in the same way that you trust a business partner, but social trust is another matter entirely. It’s going to be hard to make that happen, since social trust is such a nebulous thing, and it’ll take a lot of hard work by social roboticists to make it happen.
[ NY Times ]
[ Dr. Heather Knight ]
You can buy a shirt with Franken-Bot on it here
Thanks Stark!
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Category: Artificial Intelligence,Research
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