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Robots that act like humans are a waste of time
- carapace 9y agoThis is an unpopular but important point: Human-like robots are a kind of fetish. The first time I saw Sony's dancing robot I thought, "WTF? Make a robot to do the dishes, I'll do the dancing! I like to dance." We're conditioned by fiction to think of cute "droids" as the normal and inevitable form of robots. I remember how disappointed I was as a kid when I found out the robots building cars were just arms with tools on the ends, not "real" humanoid robots. But that lasted only a few moments because of course robots don't need to look like humans! Why would they? Only psychological impact. Robot dogs and robot people are a kind of fetish. One corollary of this is that a robot or automated system doesn't need to have all its sensors attached to its effectors. E.g. self-driving cars can and should get information from the sensors and computers in the surrounding traffic infrastructure, etc., and so the "robot" as a system is not confined to just the car. The "robot" is ambient. Automation is great. Building ersatz people and then pretending they are real is nuts. "En vee tee ess, nvts!"