GWS Robotics

History of Robotics in Medicine: Medical Uses for Robots

Philip Graves — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:50:12 +0000

Written and researched by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, 21st-27th March, 2020

Although traditionally the practice of medicine requires a combination of diagnostic and surgical skills that only highly trained doctors and nurses can dependably deliver, robots have increasingly made their way into medical settings over the past 40 years.

Robots in Surgery

Mechanical robots first came into experimental use in surgical settings in the 1980s, but the technology did not become fully developed before the 1990s.

Mechanical robots, starting with the Puma 560 in 1985, have been found useful in the precise positioning of cannulae for brain biopsies. Subsequently, specialised camera-guided robotic surgical systems with names like Neuro-Mate, Minerva, and the Robot-Assisted Microsurgery System, have been brought into use in brain surgery settings. Precision-engineered miniature mechanical robotic appendages have proven advantageous in such surgical settings, which demand highly precise placement for the safety of the patient and the effectiveness of the operation.

Laparoscopic (keyhole) surgery has also benefitted from the use of remote-controlled surgical devices to minimise the invasiveness of the surgical cuts required. Surgeons view on a monitor a display produced by miniature cameras mounted on a laparoscope inserted into the patient’s body through a small incision, and use that display to guide their remote operation of the robotic surgical devices accompanying the camera.

These systems of remote surgical control are sometimes called telemanipulators. A succession of such systems, beginning with Aesop and Zeus^[1], have came into use primarily for abdominal and chest surgery since 1994.

Surgical robots that are simply remote-controlled by a surgeon are called passive robots. Distinct from passive robots is the class of active robots, which use programming and visual data to conduct surgery without being directly controlled by a remote surgical operator. More advanced surgical robots such as the Da Vinci surgical system, widely considered to be the most advanced general-purpose robotic surgical system in use today, have this capability.

In orthopaedic settings, active surgical robots such as Robodoc and CASPAR^[2] have been used to prepare patients’ adjacent bones for fittings for bone replacements such as hip and knee replacements. It has been found in studies that they achieve this with greater accuracy than human surgeons.

Robots in Hospital Hygiene

In more recent times, mechanical robots programmed to emit ultra-violet light to disinfect premises have been deployed in locations where the spread of infections needs to be controlled such as hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and care homes have been developed.

The UV-C rays produced by these robots, with wavelengths of 250 to 280 nanometres, are effective at killing viruses and bacteria without the use of chemicals, a process known as Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI). Their use can therefore be a useful and highly time-efficient back-up to routine manual cleaning, and may be found especially useful where dangerous infectious diseases are in circulation.

The germicidal properties of UV-C rays have been known about since 1878, when a scientific paper was published describing the sterilisation of bacteria using such light. By 1910, ultraviolet light had begun to be used to disinfect drinking water; and from the early 1930s, mercury vapour lamps with germicidal light properties became commercially available.

Because the effectiveness of light-based sterilisation is dependent on line-of-sight exposure, UVGI robots must be programmed to move into every nook and cranny of the rooms in which they operate so that they can sterilise all exposed surfaces and not just those that face them when they are stood in the middle of the room.

Because ultra-violet light has mutagenic properties, it is considered unsafe for hospital patients or staff to be present in the same room at the time when UVGI is being carried out, so provision needs to be made for rooms and corridors to be temporarily vacated while disinfection is being carried out.

Among the commercially available UVGI robots today is the UVD Robot launched in Denmark in 2019, which claims to kill 99.99% of bacteria in ten minutes using 254nm light. A high-end model is the Thor UVC Robot launched by British company Finsen Technologies in 2018, which uses LIDAR technology to scan the layout and contents of rooms, and 24 separate UV lamps to delivery UV-C light. It is claimed to kill 99.9999% of bacteria in minutes, and can be adjusted in height to meet the requirements of different settings.

Robots in Outdoor Public Hygiene

Robots able to transport, heat and spray at appropriate targets conventional liquid chemical disinfectant have also come into use as a weapon for public hygiene and infection control.

Because of the use of sprayed liquid chemicals, they may be found more suitable for outdoor use, such as public amenity areas and bins, than for indoor use, where such chemicals could damage sensitive equipment, artwork and paper-based items.

Such chemical disinfection robots include a tank-like model running on tracks developed by a robotic research department at Zhejiang University.

Robots in Clinical Diagnosis and Epidemic Control

One Chinese robotics company, Orion Star, has been developing so-called ‘Intelligent Epidemic Prevention and Control Robots’. These machines are equipped with an operating system featuring a variety of artificial intelligence programming adapted to a wide range of functions in healthcare settings, with the particular advantage of remotely carrying out a preliminary diagnosis of patients presenting possible communicable infectious diseases.

Such AI functionality could otherwise have been achieved using a conventional computer program; and indeed computer programs designed to assist in medical diagnosis by deploying algorithms using knowledge bases, pattern-matching and probability theory have been in use since the early 1970s, and have since been improved by data mining to increase the quality of the available knowledge base. However, the use of a robot to carry out the initial checks brings the initial examination, upon the basis of data arising from which that programmed intelligence may act, to the patient, without a doctor or nurse being required to attend the patient at first, saving time and reducing the risk of any infectious disease carried by the patient being immediately transmitted to the attending doctor or nurse.

The functions include non-contact-based temperature measurement based on the use of infrared light, and the taking and transmission back to the doctor of photographs of the patient to assist towards diagnosis. The same robots are also able to autonomously roam hospitals, delivering supplies to where they are wanted, and monitoring wards containing patients under quarantine because of infectious diseases. When a patient feels a need for urgent assistance, the robot can also act as a telephone portal to a doctor.

In Spain, there have been plans afoot to deploy robots specifically to carry out diagnostic tests for viral infections, saving precious health service staff time.

Robots in Delivery Errands

Robots can also be put to use within hospitals to deliver blood or urine samples and other items to appropriate personnel within the hospital, saving valuable doctors’ and nurses’ time.

In the event of an outbreak of a serious infectious disease, self-driving robots can even be deployed to deliver food to patients and those required to remain in isolation in their own homes, removing the risk of infection being transferred to a human helper or delivery agent.

[1] Later systems have included CyberKnife, Raven, Socrates and Mirosurge – as well as those separately discussed below.

[2] An acronym for Computer Assisted Surgical Planning and Robotic System

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How do Social Robots Interact With Humans?

Philip Graves — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:31:00 +0000

5 Ways Social Robots Can Be Designed and Programmed to Interact With You

- Written by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, 29th July 2019
- Edited and selectively amended by David Graves, 2nd August 2019

Modern social robots are designed to interact with humans by making use of a variety of sensors that are then converted into data their programming can meaningfully interpret.

We can broadly divide the tools of interactivity with which they are equipped into artificial senses and outwardly perceptible responses, with the latter being mediated by artificial intelligence, the sum of all protocols by which they are designed to process and respond to data received and memories stored.

Having summarised these, we shall go on to look at five strategic ways in which social robots can be designed and programmed to interact with humans.

Part 1: Artificial Senses

Just as any animal needs senses to detect what is present in and happening in its physical environment, so too do robots need artificial senses for the same purpose.

21st century social robots like Pepper have been equipped with artificial sight, hearing and touch, but generally have no artificial sense of taste or smell.

Why are social robots not made able to smell or taste?

Although it is possible for sophisticated drug-detection machinery used by customs officials to intercept illicit trafficking operations to be equipped with an ‘artificial nose’, there is no clear economic justification for equipping a social robot with such expensive technology as would be required to detect and recognise the presence of chemical vapours in the air.

Taste is another animal sense that depends on the detection of chemicals, generally in the presence of a water-based fluid called saliva that breaks down the food and releases its chemical constituents; and because of the electrically conductive properties of water, it would potentially be electrically unsafe for an electronic machine with moving parts like a robot to have any kind of fluid inserted into it to imitate this process.

1a. Artificial Vision

Robots are equipped with internal digital cameras by which they are able to receive digital images of their visual environments. This makes for a rich source of data for their programming to process into identifying what these environments consist of, the first step towards responding appropriately in a way that facilitates communication with nearby people.

1b. Artificial Hearing

Modern social robots are fitted with integral microphones, allowing them to receive analogue audio data. This is then converted into digital audio by on-board Analogue-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) and fed into their programs. In order for them to make sense of that digital data, they need to be programmed to interpret the sounds they are hearing with reference to their ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) envelopes and frequencies. Ideally they should be programmed in a sophisticated enough way to recognise words from the digital audio patterns of human speech, as well as making sense of background noises and not being distracted by them when people are speaking.

1c. Artificial Touch

Advanced robots can be fitted with an outer ‘skin’ of material that is made sensitive to pressure and / or electrical conductivity, thereby imitating the key ways by which humans perceive touch and also forces acting upon them.

Touch sensitivity can be useful in social robots’ interactions with humans for several reasons. It can allow them to detect when a human is placing a hand on them, opening the way to a host of programmed social responses. It can also allow them to detect the weight of an object if they are expected to carry it, and to respond defensively or self-protectively if subjected to heavy force such as a blow.

Where robots like Pepper are fitted with an internal tablet, they additionally use touch-sensitive screen technology as a direct interface with programs with which they are equipped.

Many robots like Pepper deploy various other sensors to inform their operating systems of the behaviour of their moving parts and joints - notably inertial sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers. Information from these sensors is mostly used programmatically to avoid or detect malfunction, or to avoid falling over.

Part 2: Perceptible Responses

It is the first job of the social robot programmer to devise sophisticated routines for the interpretation of the raw digital data from the robot’s visual, sonic and tactile sense mechanisms. The second job is then to devise further routines to determine how the robot should behave based on what its program now understands to be happening around it.

This can be approached in a number of ways, but to confer to a social robot an effective semblance of intelligence requires programming it to behave in ways that seem to its human companions to be appropriate responses to their behaviour and revealed wants and intentions.

Depending on the design of the robot, it is likely to have at its disposal a variety of forms of physical movement, as well as the ability to generate artificial speech and other sounds through its built-in loudspeakers. Both these classes of functionality can be fully exploited to make the robot behave in a lifelike interactive fashion.

2a. Mechanical and Electrical Movement

Social robots can be programmed to draw on their electrical power source to move the internal joints of their bodies and to move themselves across the surface on which they are standing. Some robots can also be made to apply force to third-party objects to achieve specific purposes such as opening a door or throwing an object, and others developed by research laboratories have been made to run or jump using leg-like appendages.

Robots can be made to rotate on the spot or wander around a room or hall. They can be made to turn and tilt their heads, and move their arms, wrists and fingers, whether for lifting and carrying objects, reaching out to touch a human, or simply gesticulating. They can even be made to dance. These abilities are at the disposal of programmers of modern social robots; but they need to be programmed to move in ways that are appropriate to the situation in which they are engaged.

Robots fitted with internal lights and screens can also be programmed to switch them on or off or change their colour in order to convey a sense of emotion. Many social robots are equipped with electronic image-based ‘eyes’ whose appearance can be made to change depending on what they perceive to be happening around them and the ‘emotional’ effect that has upon them. All these changing appearances can be classed collectively as electrical movement, since no mechanical motion is involved.

2b. Speech and sound

Almost all modern social robots are equipped with internal loudspeakers and virtual speech synthesis software so that they can be made to say anything they are programmed to say, comprehensibly to human beings around them. The notable exceptions would be social robots designed to behave more like dogs and other animals, with different kinds of vocalisations.

Most social robots can also be made to produce a variety of audible tones and noises that do not resemble speech but may be designed to indicate their ‘moods’ or to attract human attention.

Some social robots can also be used to play music and pre-recorded audio tracks.

Part 3: Strategy for successful robot-human interaction

Having covered the technical basics of how robots can be equipped with the tools allowing them to interact with humans, we should also consider what kinds of interaction with robots are subjectively appreciated the most by humans. Here are five areas of their design and programmable behaviour that can make the most difference to user perceptions.

3a. Design and visual styling of robot body and head

It’s commonly observed that humans are happiest to interact with social robots that have human-like qualities of behaviour and personality but do not physically resemble humans to the degree that they could be mistaken for them.

We have been inundated with apocalyptic science fiction dramas exploring the theme of robots integrating themselves into society in human disguise and then taking control. These themes in popular fiction and film play into fears of robots that are indistinguishable from humans.

However, Hanson Robotics is a notable example of an active company that has flown in the face of this conventional wisdom and set out to produce robots that look as similar to humans as possible, at least in the designs of their heads and faces, and has even modelled several of them after real individuals. These robots have mostly been used in show applications, such as stage appearances where they are used to answer questions. People may be more comfortable watching them from the safe distance of an auditorium as part of an entertaining stage show than they would be interacting with them closely in an enclosed private setting.

Softbank Robotics is an example of a company that has followed conventional thinking in making its humanoid-style robots appear distinct from human forms. Its robot Pepper resembles neither a male nor a female form, but has some aspects of both.

Other robots may be deliberately designed not to be of humanoid form at all. Some may resemble other creatures such as dogs, while others resemble shapes such as eggs and are seemingly designed to appeal to their audience with cute or childlike features.

The choice of physical form should take into consideration the desired mechanical functionality of the robot as well as the subjective dimension of its aesthetic appeal. For a robot to be socially popular, it probably needs to be aesthetically pleasing, and not purely functional like an industrial robot arm. But equally, to be called a robot at all, it would be expected by most people to be capable of movement.

3b. Manner of movement

The movement of a social robot will always be a mechanical response to an electrical current; but mechanical robotic technology is nowadays sophisticated enough for movements that appear relatively natural or even graceful to be possible.

A social robot that can vary the speed with which it moves in a fluid and responsive manner can be much more interesting for humans to interact with than one that operates at a fixed and predictable speed in all it does.

Ideally, a robot’s movements should not be too unpredictable or make the individuals with them nervous, but should be varied enough to appear to show some kind of social awareness and inner consciousness, even though this is essentially an illusion.

3c. Sound of voice

There are also different schools of thought regarding how a social robot should sound. Should it sound like a robot, or should its speech sound as natural as that of a real human?

Non-robotic interactive devices such as Amazon’s Echo have often seemingly compensated for the lack of humanoid or animal-like form and mechanical functionality of their devices by giving them a highly realistic human voice, and this is also a possibility for robots, but are people ready to hear robots sounding exactly like humans in their homes?

Softbank has given Pepper a very obviously robotic child-like voice, for instance, so when you hear it speak, there is no risk of mistaking its voice for that of a real live human. At the same time, Pepper’s range of vocal pitch and expression is fairly broad compared with the traditional monotone robotic voices ascribed to such robotic characters as the daleks in the British television series ‘Doctor Who?’ in the 20th century, or the robot in the celebrated computer game Exile for the BBC Micro (1988) that chases the player around and beyond the main cavern while firing bullets and repeatedly growling: “’Pare^[1] to die!”

Perhaps it is indeed the necessity to move away from precisely these kinds of stereotypes of aggressive armed robots that makes it a more palatable move not to give today’s social robots monotonous voices.

3d. Interactivity with Visual Environment

Social robots built to have the appearance of eyes should be programmed to show engagement in a way that attracts the attention of those around but without making them too uncomfortable.

Sophisticated social robots can be programmed to recognise movement and to distinguish faces from inanimate objects, to read facial expressions, and to follow individuals around. They probably also ought to be programmed to vary their gaze so that they do not stare constantly at one individual for long periods, a behaviour that would be considered impolite and discomforting in most circumstances of human company.

They can also be programmed to respond to sudden and shocking movements by assuming defensive postures or frightened facial expressions as represented by their coloured lights.

When a human draws very close to a robot in a non-aggressive fashion, it may be programmed to adapt is behaviour by focusing closer attention on that individual, and possibly even by moving its arms into a position of readiness to gently embrace or to have its hand held – provided that the design of robot is robust enough to withstand this and that safeguards have been built in against pinched or trapped human fingers.

It is also within the scope of robotic programming to recognise and mirror certain human behaviours such as dancing and the adoption of certain postures or gestures.

3e. Interactivity with Sonic Environment

One of the primary modes by which social robots function is to seek to respond to cues that could be giving them permission to start a conversation – most especially, an individual greeting them. This can be managed by a combination of programming that recognises language and programming that infers from the orientation of the human speaker’s head and eyes that the robot is most likely to be the one being talked to at that time.

Social robots can also be programmed to recognise vocal expression and not just the content of language, as a means of trying to read the mood of their interlocutors; and they can be made to respond adaptively to such cues by varying their behaviour either to mirror or to respond in a fashion complementary to the manifest mood of the humans with them – whether this be cheerful and jolly, nervous and animated, sombre and morose, or calm and serious.

Sophisticated programming would combine the comprehension of language with non-verbal clues to mood in determining the most appropriate way to respond.

[1] i.e. ‘prepare’, reduced to monosyllabic form, presumably as a statement of the single-minded stupidity of the device and not as a result of a simple failure to program the BBC’s 8-bit sound chip with the first syllable

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A Brief History of Robots and Robotics, from 300 B.C. to 1969

Philip Graves — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 13:21:00 +0000

The Early History of Robots and Automata

Written and researched by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, 25th-28th June, 2018

What is a Robot?

Oxford Dictionaries gives multiple definitions of robot^[1]. One is limited to the realm of science fiction, while another is figuratively employed in respect of people. But it is the real-world use of robot to describe a type of machine in which we are interested here: ‘a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by computer’.

Since the use of the modifier ‘especially’ implicitly extends the definition of robot to all forms of machine that carry out complex actions automatically, we must look back to before the age of computers for the first examples of robots.

The modern use of the word ‘robots’ in representation of machines that operate automatically dates back to Czech writer Karel Čapek's science fiction play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, first published in 1920; before then, the term ‘automata’ was widely used instead to convey the same meaning.

Before 1920, 'robots', though it was in fairly common use as a word, was typically restricted in its application to the sense of servile human labourers: see for example the references in 'Revelations of Austria Volume 2' by Michał Kubrakiewicz (1846).^[1a]

In fact, a study of literary references as automatically collated by Google Ngram shows that 'automaton' and 'automata' have continued to be widely used alongside 'robot' and 'robots' to the present day.^[1b] It was only in 1941 that the volume of references to 'robot' first surpassed that of references to 'automaton'; and they subsequently changed places over the following decades, before 'robot' definitively took the upper hand in 1971; while the plural form 'robots' first overook 'automata' in 1931 before also changing places with it sporadically over the decades to follow, and definitively surpassing it in 1978.^[1c]

What do we know about the History of Robots?

A useful recent source on the history of robots, particularly focused on those designed to take a human form, is the book ‘Robots: the 500-year quest to make machines human’ edited by Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering at the Science Museum, London, and published in 2017 by Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd..

We owe its expert compilers a debt of gratitude for their research; and while the book looks beyond the simple history of robots as machines to address essentially philosophical questions such as the difference between a robot and a human, questions that exceed the scope of this article, we shall refer extensively to its historical findings here, in summary form.

Ancient Automata

Contributing author E. R. Truitt traces the production of automata back to the 3^rd century BCE, and the moving figures designed and built by engineers trained in Alexandria, ancient Egypt^[2].

During the Ptolemaic Dynasty that ruled Egypt for the next three centuries, moving figures and statues of humans (including mechanical trumpeters), animals and mythological beasts were integrated into the Royal pageantry.

Some of them used the most advanced hydraulic and pneumatic engineering of the day, while others, designed as theatre props, operated on the same principles as clockwork, being powered by falling weights that drive axles, as evidenced in the account by the famed technical writer Hero of Alexandria entitled ‘Peri automatopoietikes’ (‘on making automata’)^[3].

Medieval Automata, 900-1400

In early medieval times, Arabic-speaking scholars translated ancient Greek texts on automata into Arabic, paving the way for further developments in automation engineering over the following centuries.

Truitt records^[4] that Arabic mechanical engineers introduced new types of gears and valves that assisted them in producing more complex automata than the ancient Alexandrians had managed, including (among other examples) wine-servants able both to pour a liquid from a large vessel to a smaller one and to hand the smaller vessel to a human; water-clocks tracking time with moving zodiacal dials; and programmable water jets and fountains. Some of these were described in ‘The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices’ by Ismail Al-Jazari, which has been dated to 1206, while other sources describing medieval automata date back to the 11^th century.

There are surviving eyewitness accounts of chirping mechanical birds in middle-eastern palaces as early as the 9^th and 10^th centuries, with some reports of mechanical lions in what was then known as Constantinople (nowadays Istanbul). The knowledge of how to make mechanical birds had spread to western Europe a few centuries later, and realistic examples were found at Hesdin, the French chateau of Count Robert II of Artois in Picardy, in the 14^th century, alongside mechanical monkeys^[5]. Robert’s successor at Hesdin, Duke Philip III of Burgundy, took this theme further in the following century, adding a mechanised fountain, a mechanical talking hermit, and more malign playful contraptions such as jets of soot and figures armed with sticks programmed to attack visitors.^[6]

Albertus Magnus, a 14^th century Dominican friar who was also an astrologer, created a talking metal statue that pronounced oracular responses to questions asked to it before it was deliberately broken by Saint Thomas Aquinas, another friar from the same order who had studied under Albert but believed the automaton to be an evil idol^[7].

King Richard II of England was ceremonially crowned by a mechanical angel built by the goldsmiths’ guild the day before his official coronation in 1377.

Renaissance and early modern automata, 1400-1799

By the sixteenth century, the creation of realistically human-looking robotic figures had become more commonplace, and the sophistication of robotic engineering had been considerably refined and developed. Robotic musicians able to play instruments were now featured alongside robotic dancers.^[8] By 1738, a fully functional flute-playing robot had been created by Jacques de Vaucanson and put on show in Paris, as Andrew Nahum records in great detail.^[9]

In religious settings, robotic monks were popular for display, alongside bleeding models of Jesus and roaring depictions of Satan. A surviving example of the Renaissance robotic monk, commissioned by King Philip II of Spain, used a clockwork mechanism to pray, walk, move its lips, lift objects, and beat its chest.^[10] The Catholic Church widely commissioned clocks that featured advanced automata playing out Biblical scenes.^[11]

In the 1770s, Swiss clockmaker Pierre Jacquet-Droz built a series of sophisticated robots, some of which are kept in working condition to this day. They include a breathing woman playing a harpsichord, and a boy writing a series of notes with real ink drawn from a quill.^[12]

Also in the 1770s, Belgian mechanic Joseph Merlin created a mechanical swan able to dive into a mechanical bed of turbulent water, and catch and swallow a small mechanical fish^[13]; while Hungarian Wolfgang von Kempelen created a remote-controlled chess-playing Turk that became a popular stage showpiece on tour, its mechanical arm liftable to move chess pieces between squares on demand by the concealed controller, thereby creating the illusion of artificial intelligence^[14].

Early industrial automata, 1740-1800

While automata were mainly used for entertainment purposes in those days, their industrial potential as cost-saving efficiency-boosting devices had begun to be explored. Aside from his flute-player, de Vaucanson had also developed in the 1740s an automatic silk-weaving loom able to follow instructions programmed into it on cards. This invention caused riots by crochet workers and left the inventor in fear for his life^[15], but was subsequently further developed with the first proven commercial application of digital programming in the form of cards punched with unique patterns by Joseph Jacquard.

Also around the 1740s, an automatic lathe was produced, reputedly for King Frederick II of Prussia. It has since been acquired and restored by the Science Museum.^[16]

In 1785, an integrated fully automatic water-powered industrial flour mill that operated continuously using elevators and conveyor belts to transport material through the system was introduced by Oliver Evans in Delaware, USA.^[16a] The industrial revolution, assisted by automatic machinery, was well underway.

The development of the Watt steam engine^[16b] between 1763 and 1775 is commonly regarded as a turning point in the industrial revolution, since it vastly increased the efficiency of steam engines, earlier, inefficient iterations of which had been in use to pump water since 1712, and therefore allowed for much more power-demanding automated industrial tasks to be engineered. By 1800, nearly 500 Watt engines were in industrial use powering mill machinery, water pumps and blast furnaces.^[16c]

Early modern robots, 1920-1959

In the 1920s and 1930s, in the UK a number of remote-controlled full-sized humanoid robots with multi-part metal bodies and limbs able to carry out sophisticated movements was produced. These were designed and built for public display and show by a couple of British engineers seemingly working independently of each other at similar times.

Captain W. H. Richards of Devon built ones called Eric (1928) and George (1932). Eric has been described as a 45kg aluminium armour-plated knight with spark-shooting electrified teeth. He was able to stand and sit, bow, gesticulate, turn his head to either side, and speak for up to four minutes.^[17] At a later stage in his development, the playing of more than fifty pre-recorded spoken answers could be activated in response to questions posed by live audiences or other interlocutors at the intervention of a remote human operator^[18], in a manner not dissimilar to how today’s social robots are deployed in live demonstrations almost 90 years later.

George featured a more refined physical form bearing a closer resemblance to the natural shape of the human body, and was invested with wireless remote control and virtual eyes based on photo-electric cells.^[19]

Subsequently, Charles Lawson of Northamptonshire created a robot called Robert, the prototype for which was completed in 1938. Robert talked using prerecorded sounds reproduced on an internal record player. His trademark party trick was the nowadays deeply unfashionable habit of smoking a cigarette – quite a feat for an inorganic body having only a metal half-cylinder in place of a chest and bellows instead of lungs^[20]. He was activated by voice control to perform dozens of preset routines.

In 1937, another smoking robot named Elektro had been showcased at an exhibition in the United States, leading some historians to suspect that Lawson’s Robert took inspiration from it.

Also in the United States, another robotic humanoid named Robert, but this one bearing more corporeal resemblances to George rather than to the British Robert, emerged as an acting prop for the actress Diana Dors in the early 1950s. The family of Captain Richards reports that this Robert was also built by him, although he was not publicly credited with it in promotional materials of the time.^[21]

Early Modern Computers, 1830-1969

Before signing off, we shall present a brief overview of the early history of computers, since computers are the essential programming control systems that drive modern robots, as well as driving purely visual and sonic routines such as graphical displays and animated computer games on visual display units.

Starting in 1833, Charles Babbage designed a blueprint for the first modern computer involving separate software-serving and hardware components, which he called the Analytical Engine.^[22] It incorporated arithmetic logic, conditional branching and loops, and memory, and had several dedicated programs written for it in subsequent years.^[23]

But only small parts of Babbage’s massive design were constructed in his lifetime; and it was not until the 1930s and 1940s, a whole century later, that the modern development of computers really took off, thanks primarily to Alan Turing, who In 1936 developed his detailed concept of a universal machine that became the blueprint for all modern computer design.

In 1941, a computer able to simultaneously solve 29 equations was constructed by J. V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry of Iowa State University, while in 1943-4, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania built a huge digital computer called ENIAC (Electronical Numerical Integrator and Calculator) that deployed 18,000 vacuum tubes and filled a 6*12 metre room. The subsequent invention of the transistor in 1947 paved the way to space-saving tubeless solid state electronics and to the integrated circuit in 1958.^[24]

The first modern computer languages allowing programmers to convey simple-to-understand instructions instead of having to use assembly language were developed in the 1950s. The late Corrado Böhm of the University of Rome was an early pioneer. In the UK, a language called Autocode was developed in 1952. Subsequently, the better-known Fortran appeared in 1957, with Lisp following in 1958, Cobol in 1959, and the first incarnation of BASIC in 1964. C, a staple of late 20^th century computing, was a relative latecomer to the scene, with development taking place from 1969 to 1973. ^[25]

Conclusion:

The lineage of robots and history of robotics has perhaps unexpectedly ancient origins; and much as 21^st century developments have thrust the field into the spotlight in a novel or futuristic light, these developments are only the most recent products of thousands of years of successive developments in mechanical engineering driving automatic routines; while even the digital technology by which today’s robots are programmed has been under development since its first appearance in industrial applications in the 1740s.

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/robot

[1a] Kubrakiewicz, Michał 'Revelations of Austria Volume 2' (1846), p. 227

[1b] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=automaton%2Cautomata&year_start=1900&year_end=2017

[1c] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=automaton%2Cautomata%2Crobot%2Crobots&year_start=1900&year_end=1980

[2] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 34-5

[3] https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/classicsresearch/researchprojects/heroandhisautomata/

[4] Russell, ed., op. cit, p. 35

[5] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 42-5

[6] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 45

[7] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 45

[8] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 46

[9] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 51-3

[10] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 48-9

[11] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 54

[12] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 54-7

[13] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 58

[14] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 58-60

[15] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 64

[16] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 68-9

[16a] http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=3567

[16b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

[16c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Steam_power

[17] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 76

[18] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 77

[19] Russell, ed., op. cit., pp. 78-9

[20] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-39057312

[21] http://cyberneticzoo.com/robots/1932-%E2%80%93-george-robot-%E2%80%93-capt-w-h-richards-british/

[22] Russell, ed., op. cit., p. 64

[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine

[24] https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_B%C3%B6hm

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Robots vs. Humans in the Workplace

Philip Graves — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 13:23:00 +0000

A summary and analysis of the findings of five major studies into the effects of robots on the displacement of jobs

Researched and written by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, May 31st - June 5th, 2018

Introduction

The title of this article is deliberately provocative, playing on popular fears that the presence of robots in the workplace is mutually opposed to that of humans. Futurologists have lately been working overtime to speculate on the structural changes to the job market likely to be brought about by developments in robotics over the next fifty to one hundred years. Here we will argue with reference to some authoritative recent studies that robots and humans can work alongside each other in the workplace without the presence of robots displacing humans from the labour market altogether.

At the outset, it’s important to acknowledge that robotisation is not something entirely new, but rather a headline-grabbing current area of dramatic growth in the ongoing move towards more automated processes that began some three centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when inventions such as the steam engine (1713) and the automatic flour mill (1785) reduced the need for labour in mechanical and food production processes.

The Automation of Communications

To take a particular example, the automation of long-distance communications (previously dependent on mail couriers and messengers on foot or horseback) has benefitted over that time from a host of successive developments such as the development of the locomotive engine, the petrol-powered motor vehicle, analogue telephony, radio and television broadcasting, and ultimately the Internet and wireless mobile telecommunications. And yet, the number of jobs in the areas that service these communications probably equals or exceeds the number of those lost from the conventional mail service as it was in pre-industrial times, because the wealth of new technologies has vastly driven down the cost of long-distance communications at the same time as increasing the range of types of communications available, and has correspondingly raised the demand for them.

Automation drives up efficiency by reducing the need for labour in particular processes, which tends to increase productivity and the size of the economy as a whole, since more labour and more capital become available for other jobs and purchases (respectively) as a result of the savings made in each automated process.

The Automation of Mechanical Work

To take another example, mechanical jobs that involve mass-production have already been substantially automated and robotised. They are carried out in precisely controlled conditions and are therefore amenable to the use of robots. We see examples of this in the processed food manufacturing industry, the automotive industry and the electronics industry.

Jobs that require the application of more exacting skill to individual locations and projects, such as building and bricklaying, continue for now to be almost exclusively carried out by manual human operators albeit with the help of heavy machinery such as powered cranes on high-rise building projects.

That may be set to change to a degree, as robots designed to construct buildings such as houses according to preset plans are already under development, but they may be found to be economically viable only on substantial new housing developments where multiple homes are needed, and there could also be obstacles in terms of regulatory approval on grounds of health and safety and buildings regulations that will take decades to overcome.

Direct human input will continue to be the norm on interior decorating and finishing tasks, and all for which precision placement and drilling within a complex and individually variable three-dimensional environment are needed, such as electrical installations and plumbing installations, which are much more demanding to manage than readily robotised tasks like vacuum cleaning.

The Automation of Calculations and Writing

It is worth bearing in mind that numerous work processes have also already been automated and made more efficient by the use of computers. In the not-so-distant past, all arithmetic calculations and accounting tasks were manually carried out with writing instruments on paper. The commercial introduction of the electronic pocket calculator in 1970 paved the way to instant sums, saving countless time on operations at work that required arithmetic.

This was followed by the mass adoption of home computers and their successors such as Personal Computers in the 1980s and 1990s. While these, in connection with attached printers, initially displaced the typewriter as the tool of choice for the production of written content, vastly improving the efficiency of such processes, their ever-increasing power and storage space has since afforded almost limitless potential for gains in the efficiency with which complex operations from graphic design to music production are undertaken. Computers lack the obvious mechanical appendages of robots but are essentially saving time in very similar ways and have been doing so for the best part of half a century already.

Studies

Within the past five years, several high-profile studies have been published, attempting to gauge the impact of robotisation on changes to the labour market and the economy as a whole, including the displacement of jobs and the creation of others. We summarise and interpret the findings of a selection of five of the most important widely publicised ones in turn.

1. Oxford University Report ‘The Future of Employment’ (2013)

In September 2013, two academics from the University of Oxford, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, published a report entitled ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?’

The report is a projection using a mathematical model of the probability of computerisation for jobs in 702 occupations in the United States only. The notion of computerisation implicitly encompasses the programming of robots as well as all other software, and includes autonomous driverless cars.

The authors, citing other academic research, state that employment particularly declines in ‘routine-intensive’ occupations as a result of computerisation.

They conclude (p. 37, Figure III) that 47% of jobs in the United States in 2010 carry at least a 70% risk of computerisation, with 19% of jobs carrying a risk of between 30 and 70%, and 33% carrying a risk in the range of 0-30%. The time period for computerisation is not specifically delimited, but the authors speculate ‘perhaps a decade or two’, while taking pains to point out that their projections are only of the share of employment that ‘can potentially be substituted by computer capital, from a technological capabilities point of view’ (p. 42) and are not an estimate of the true extent or speed of automation that will be achieved. Economic and regulatory hurdles (pp. 42-3) are cited as possible factors acting against the full realisation of the theoretically projected potential.

The industry sectors at greatest risk of computerisation in terms of the total absolute numbers of jobs affected are identified as office and administrative support, sales and related, service, transportation and material moving, and production, with some jobs in construction and extraction and in management, business and financial also at high risk of computerisation.

The authors project (p. 39) that computerisation will follow two waves separated by a period of relatively slow change while ‘engineering bottlenecks to computerisation’ are cleared.

They opine (p. 45) that there is evidence to suggest that jobs requiring a higher level of educational attainment and jobs paying higher wages are at lower risk of computerisation than those at the other end of the scale in each respect.

While the Oxford University report provides a thought-provoking projection of the theoretically possible upper limits for computerisation of jobs that were current in 2010, it is our view that the authors’ speculations that such rates of computerisation as they projected could be achieved in a decade or two from 2013 were wildly exaggerated in terms of the speed of change they would require.

It also fails to give substantive treatment to the issue of labour market flexibility and potential for retraining in other areas, or to the economic processes whereby jobs displaced by automation may be replaced by others.

In summary, the largely dry, theoretical and academic report by Frey and Osborne contributed to the ignition of plenty of important social and economic discussion, but has been largely superseded by other, more insightful and better-balanced reports since.

2. Bank of England study (2015)

In November 2015, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane unveiled, in a speech delivered to the Trade Union Congress in London, the key findings of a study by the Bank into the risk and impact of job automation in the UK, opining (p. 12) that as many as 15 million UK jobs could be lost to automation within 20-30 years.

The B.o.E. study identified administrative, clerical and production-related tasks as those being at greatest risk of automation, and jobs with the lowest wages in general.

Haldane qualified the figures as a ‘broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable’.

We were unable to locate a transcript of the study itself at the time of going to press, nor can we ascertain that it has even been made public, and we are therefore unable to comment in detail on its claims.

3. UK Government Report ‘Made Smarter Review’ (2017)

In October 2017, a UK government-commissioned independent review of the future adaptation of the British industrial sector to new digital technology developments, led by Professor Juergen Maier, the CEO of Siemens, was published under the title ‘Made Smarter Review’. The review was originally announced as the Industrial Digitalisation review in the government’s Industrial Strategy Green Paper in January 2017.

This report focuses on the identification and strategic pursuit of the opportunities for British business in the light of a broad spectrum of developments in digital technology. Over 200 UK-based organisations, including university departments and businesses, were consulted in its preparation (p. 4).

Key recommendations include creating a national ‘digital ecosystem’ under the leadership of a national ‘Made Smarter UK (MSUK) Commission’, that will ‘accelerate the innovation and diffusion of industrial digital technologies’. To this end, twelve ‘digital innovation hubs’ and five ‘digital research centres focused on developing new technologies (including robotics and automation) are to be set up.

The review also specifically recommends retraining a million industrial workers with the skills needed to use digital technologies.

More detailed coverage of its specific recommendations is given on tables from pp. 13-16.

The stated aim is to increase the prosperity of the country by taking a lead in increasing productivity (p. 5). The report projects (p. 8) that harnessing new technology to increase productivity faster than other countries will significantly boost the manufacturing industry in the UK as well as the digital technology development industry.

Our view at GWS is that adopting this strategy of embracing new digital technology in a concerted way rather than resisting or fearing it will indeed be good for the UK economy and therefore ultimately create and conserve more jobs than the alternative approach of protectionism towards current jobs or (as espoused by some) the taxation of robots (a proposal we reject as explained here).

4. McKinsey Global Institute report ‘Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained’ (2017)

In December 2017, a research foundation called the McKinsey Global Institute published a report entitled ‘Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation’. Our page references here refer to the visible pagination in the executive summary, whose text is also found in the main report.

The report is primarily interested in labour market change projections for a time point based in the relatively near future, just 12 years away in 2030. It is based on a study of 46 countries and attempts to model the net employment changes by 2030 for over 800 occupations.

The authors argue (p. [1]) that a ‘growing and dynamic economy’ partly ‘fuelled by technology itself and its contributions to productivity’ should create enough job growth to ‘more than offset the jobs lost to automation’ provided that governments make appropriate interventions. This argument is supported by their examination of the historical effects of automation on employment levels (Box E1, pp. 4-5, and p. 12), which closely agrees with our similar assessment made in January 2017 in our article ‘Are Robots Going to Steal All Our Jobs?’

They conclude (p. [1]) that ‘societal choices will determine…. whether… these coming workforce transitions are smooth, or whether unemployment and income inequality rise’.

The report quantifies (p. 2) the percentage of work to be displaced by automation by 2030 with an estimate of 15% on average globally, or up to 30% if adoption of new automated technologies proves much faster than expected; but they add that only about 3% of employees would be forced to change their occupational category completely as a result of this, extending to a maximum of 14% in the fastest-case adoption scenario.

The Institute’s projections vary widely by country (p. 3), with work in emerging economies such as Kenya (5.5%) and India (9.5%) generally being perceived as at lower estimated risk of automation by 2030 than that in highly developed economies such as Japan (26.5%), Germany (24%) and the UK (20%).

We presume that this differential projection is a result of more developed economies being expected to be in a greater state of preparedness to adopt and utilise new digital automation technologies in the relatively near future, whether in terms of affordability or in terms of established skillsets and access to training.

We can also perhaps usefully interpret the authors’ fastest-case scenario projections as a more plausible projection for a considerably more distant time-point than 2030, for example somewhere in the range of 2050-2070.

The authors identify (p. 6) ‘physical [activities] in predictable environments’ and the ‘collecting and processing of data’ as being among the areas of work most likely to be automated.

Areas of work where they conversely expect to see net growth in employment to 2030 (pp. 9-10) include health-care, childcare and other care-giving roles, education, engineering, scientific research, accountancy, information technology, executive and managerial roles, building and related professions, gardening, cleaning, and the creative and performance arts.

5. OECD Report 'Automation, Skills and Training' (2018)

In March 2018, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released a paper entitled ‘Automation, Skills Use and Training’, which concluded (p. 7) that about 14% of jobs in countries participating in a survey carry a probability of automation of 70% or higher, and a further 32% of jobs carry a risk of automation in the 50-70% bracket.

The OECD’s report found that the risk of automation varied widely between countries, with Nordic countries and the UK tending to be among the least affected on a global scale. The major reason for this was deduced as being that within equivalent industrial sectors, jobs are assigned differently across different countries. The effective implication here is that within each industrial sector, efficiency savings have already been implemented to a more advanced degree in some countries than others.

The risk of automation also understandably differs widely according to the type of work being carried out (p. 8), with manufacturing and agriculture found to be at highest risk, while postal services, road haulage and food services are also identified as being highly automatable.

The report also found that the risk of automation closely negatively correlates with the level of educational attainment and skill needed to undertake the job. This stands to reason, since it’s easier to program robots to carry out tasks that do not require vast knowledge or independent thinking.

A conclusion drawn (p. 9) is that workers in automatable jobs will need to be provided for with retraining. The authors caution in effect that since those holding the most automatable jobs tend to have the lowest levels of educational attainment and the least likelihood of participating in formal education, adult education schemes to retrain them will need to be carefully adapted to their needs.

General Conclusion:

Within the space of five years, the projections of future job displacements by robots and other forms of digitally driven automation have matured from sketchy outlines of maximum theoretical potential to exhaustively discussed studies of likely economic effects and opportunities.

We find ourselves in general agreement with the well-balanced reasoning of the authors of the more recent studies 3, 4 and 5.

Robots and self-driving transportation will be integral parts of the coming chapter in automation, and we can expect them to further drive up the efficiency of the economy without detriment to net employment rates, provided that at government policy level we have the foresight to smooth the wheels of change and provide the necessary retraining infrastructure and other appropriate forms of support where needed for those members of the national workforce whose existing jobs are set to be displaced.

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Robot Ethics and Pepper: Twenty Questions

Philip Graves — Sat, 26 May 2018 13:13:00 +0000

Twenty Questions On the Ethics of Robotics and Pepper Robot

Journalist Eithne Dodd interviewed Philip Graves of GWS Robotics on May 26th, 2018

In early June, parts of the interview were used in her article for Decode Magazine on the use of Pepper Robot in assisting patients with autism and dementia.

With her kind permission, we now publish the full unedited transcript of her thought-provoking interview

1. If an AI machine has no pain receptors, is it ethical to kick it?

No. While causing pain to life-forms that can experience it is infinitely more unethical, kicking an artificially intelligent machine is still unethical.

There are two main reasons I can think of for believing this.

The first is that the wanton destructiveness of, or infliction of deliberate damage upon, useful non-destructive objects is generally unethical from the standpoint that once damaged and deformed, they are less likely to be useful to anyone. If an artificially intelligent device is no longer wanted, a more ethical way to dispose of it would be to give or sell it to someone who wants it.

This is partly an environmental argument but could also be a purely economic one from the standpoint of the efficient use of limited resources.

If the device is obsolete technology for which there is no market any more, or has broken down irreparably, then there are ethical procedures for seeing about the recycling of its parts, which deforming it with a sharp kick will do nothing to assist and may hinder.

The environmental cost of producing a sophisticated artificially intelligent device in the first place is a considerable one, and it would be recklessly irresponsible to then take actions to destroy it if it is working properly and could deliver continuing value to others.

The second reason has to do with the impulse to kick or otherwise aggressively attack an apparently intelligent object, even if this appearance is known to be an illusion, being an unethical one to act upon, because in so doing, one would be giving free rein to one's appetite to hurt or destroy apparently living entities out of anger or spite.

While there are many who would feel that even damaging obviously inanimate property, such as by kicking in a metal garage door or smashing a glass, is a recklessly destructive application of aggressive impulses (and may even be criminal if the property belongs to someone else), targeting a machine that is designed to behave in a lifelike fashion could be seen as an aggravated offence. At the very least, it sets a very bad example and could be mentally training the one carrying out this act to feel more confident about or at ease with attacking real live creatures in the future.

It is important to note, however, that the point encapsulated in this second reason does not imply that artificially intelligent machines have rights. They are still machines, but it is nonetheless demonstrably unethical with regard to the aforementioned considerations to kick or otherwise aggressively attack them.

2. If you were to kick one of the robots at your work, would disciplinary action be taken against you? If so, on what grounds would that disciplinary action be?

I would very much hope and expect that disciplinary action would be taken against me in that circumstance! In fact, I would hope and deserve to be sacked. There would be at least two grounds for this - one is that I would have caused criminal damage to my employer's property, and the other is that I would have behaved in an unacceptably aggressive fashion in the workplace, not befitting of my status as an employee.

As an ardent pacifist who has never punched or kicked a soul - not even when on the receiving end of such treatment by other boys in my schooldays, I would be astonished and shocked at myself if I were ever to find myself in this situation.

3a. Does GWS Robotics have a code of conduct for how to treat your fellow human workers?

I'm not aware of an explicit one. It's a small, family-run business, and the directors (my elder brother David and father Richard) generally make an intuitive personality assessment of prospective employees as well as assessing the fitness of their technical skills and training to do the job before offering them a role.

Personality assessment at the time of interview is to a large degree a subjective process, but the general unspoken assumption is that anyone who passes the initial screening process by the directors is presumed of 'good character' (or at least, willing and able to abide by standards that would generally be considered to constitute this while on duty in the workplace) until proven otherwise.

If a newly hired employee began to show previously unsuspected signs of problematically aggressive or bullying behaviour to other members of staff, the directors would move fairly swiftly to terminate their employment.

3b. Does it have one for AI machines? If not, do you think it is likely to develop one?

There is again no explicit code of conduct for the treatment of AI machines at GWS Robotics, but the unwritten assumption is that such devices should not be abused. Whether the individual employee understands this simply in terms of the belonging of the devices to the employer, or further takes a view that it is generally wrong to abusively treat such devices, is perhaps a moot point, provided that respectful and non-destructive standards of behaviour are maintained.

It is possible that the company may develop an explicit code in the future. This would be more likely if it grew in size to the point where it became important to codify the otherwise merely generally understood reasonable expectations of employee conduct.

4. What is your job role?

Within GWS Robotics, I am officially a copywriter and digital marketer. This entails that I write text for the pages of the company website, optimise the website for visibility in search engines, and write articles about topics of general interest in the domain of robotics for the website.

In practice, I also participate in promotional opportunities by liaising with the press and with organisations who want to arrange for a visit by our robot, for example schools; operate the robot at expos and shows where it is interacting with the public, and contribute specific ideas to the core programming team for the development of applications, behaviours and lines of speech for use by the robot in particular settings.

5. Do you help to build artificially intelligent machines?

No. GWS Robotics does not construct robot hardware. We custom-program hardware produced by much larger corporations such as Softbank Robotics, the company that owns Pepper robot. The development of robot hardware requires a particular set of skills in mechanical engineering. This is not our collective interest, which lies much more in the software (programming) side. Others produce robots; we envision creative uses for them and program them accordingly.

6. Are computers smarter than us?

That depends on one's understanding of 'smart', but, even taking it for granted that the intended meaning of 'smart' here is the American sense of 'intelligent' and not the traditional British or Irish one of 'well-dressed', I would generally say 'no' in answer to this question.

The two areas of relevance in which computers excel and already win over humans are the power to process calculations and the exact, lossless storage and recall of memory.

Already in the 1980s, the former attribute (processing power) was being demonstrated effectively by chess computers and chess software that was difficult for players of ordinary club-level abilities to defeat. And by 1997, a chess computer had managed to defeat a reigning chess world champion in Garry Kasparov. Since 1997, computer processing power has increased many times, and with it the advantage of computers over humans in terms of raw mathematical processing power.

Similarly, the memory and quickly retrievable data storage capacities of computers have vastly increased since 1997, when a typical hard drive on a well-specified new PC would fit 2 Gb of data, compared with 2 Tb 20 years later, an increase of 1000 times in two decades alone.

Humans are no match for advanced computers in these attributes because computers are precision-built from solid materials continuously powered by an even stream of electricity, and are designed to detect, process and store nothing but digital binary code, whereas humans are organic life-forms made from cells that depend on a regular supply of a host of vital nutrients, have evolved to put their own needs for survival and companionship before mathematical operations, and are designed to detect, process and store analogue signals from the complex physical world. In short, humans are equipped to live and to experience their environments, computers merely to process. Computers are, after all, machines.

But our deficiencies in comparison to computers in the specific areas outlined above do not make us less intelligent than computers. The stem of the word 'intelligent' is the Latin verb intellegere, which means 'to understand'. Computers can process a lot of binary code, and quickly deliver informative appropriate outputs reflecting that processing when they have been programmed to deliver processing for a particular purpose. But they understand absolutely nothing, because they are not conscious entities, and have no brain, nervous system, feelings or soul.

Any outputs from computers that might appear to us to show intelligence are merely the product of how they were programmed by intelligent human programmers. And the same is true of robots. It doesn't really matter whether we dress them in desktop cases or in robotic bodies - they are still digital processors without consciousness. In the final analysis, they are programmable arrays of logic gates and nothing more.

Humans have the quality of true consciousness that gives them vastly superior intellectual potential to any machine. We are able to interpret our environment based on continuous experience and learning at very subtle levels, conscious and subconscious, and to understand from the predictably replicable patterns in the behaviour of the external world that it is real and that it interacts with us. We also understand that we have limited lifespan and fragile bodies and health, and can draw behavioural and moral lessons from this. Not all of us are able to solve complex equations that to a well-programmed computer would be easy, but that again is not a deficiency in true intelligence, which lies more in the wisdom of intelligent adaptation to reality in all its facets, personal and material. Some of us can even theorise and philosophise on open-ended questions of the nature, meaning or value of life and existence in ways that would be completely incomprehensible to a computer.

7. How do we know artificial intelligence from human (organic?) intelligence?

A fair test of this would require blindness on the part of the beholder as to whether he or she was interacting with a human or a computer. To achieve this blindness, the interaction would have to be mediated by digital or electronic means that prevented the obvious signatures of human behaviour such as the ebb and flow of a continuous human voice or the appearance of a real human face from giving the game away.

If you ask a series of questions to a hypothetical digital interface that may be responded to by either an unseen human or a computer at a distance, it should ordinarily be possible for you to distinguish the human from the computer after a while, as a result of the computer delivering obviously repetitive or stock answers.

However, it is worth remembering that artificial intelligence is designed to give the illusion of true intelligence and, if programmed by a thoughtful human programmer with a thorough repertoire of answers in response to all manner of possible questions, an artificially intelligent device accessed blind through a digital interface could deliver a fairly convincing illusion of being intelligent.

This is ultimately because the original programmer's intelligence is being experienced by the one receiving the answers from the artificially intelligent device. It may then take considerable probing to shatter the illusion by exposing unnatural patterns of responses.

Fortunately, in most situations where we interact with either people or A.I. machines, we are exposed to plenty of other cues by which to differentiate their nature. In social situations where interactions are conducted in situ rather than through electronic means of communication, for example, there are numerous additional signals by which people communicate, including movements, facial expression, patterns of eye contact, variations in tone and amplitude of voice, and energy or vibrations, that we may register at a subconscious level, and that allow us to understand a lot about the other person and what he or she is thinking or feeling on various levels.

Social robots are nowadays being programmed to read some of these cues and respond to them, but this is not an organic process, unlike the one that humans experience, so at best it can give a fairly crude set of data that feed into the interaction with the human onlooker.

8. Do you think we will always be able to tell the difference between the two kinds of intelligence?

As the self-learning capabilities built into artificially intelligent devices become ever more sophisticated, we can expect them to deliver ever more sophisticated illusions of intelligence that could trick onlookers blinded as to their true nature into imagining them to possess a form of consciousness. However, the subtleties of real human communication are very sophisticated, and the volatile sentimental and emotional nature of organic human beings as reflected in their attachments to each other and to pets and other life-forms would be extremely difficult for any programmed artificially intelligent device to pull off entirely persuasively.

Actors are trained in effect to lie, from a strictly literal point of view, but can do so in a persuasive way because they are humans playing the roles of other humans using the human form and while interacting in real time with those around them. Even then, we can tell the difference between people acting and being themselves most of the time.

Computers and robots don't have the resources by which to act. They simply process inputs and respond with outputs, exactly as they have been programmed to do by their human programmers.

9. Do you work with robot Pepper? What kind of intelligence and intelligence level does Pepper have?

Yes, I do. Pepper I would assess to be a stepping stone in the evolution of artificially intelligent social robots. Its level of artificial intelligence is moderate in absolute terms and a lot more limited than we can expect to be exhibited by state-of-the-art social robots in another thirty to fifty years from now, but enough to make for some entertaining experiences for those who seek to interact with it.

Pepper is able to use visual sensors and a microphone to draw information about its immediate environment, and is programmed to respond in a fairly natural-looking manner, for example by turning to face the source of the loudest human voice in its vicinity, or following the human standing closest to it within its field of vision with its eyes. It is programmed with voice recognition and language interpretation capabilities, but these are relatively rudimentary out of the box, and custom programming is needed to develop them. It is also programmed to detect some signs of basic emotions such as sadness and anger and to adjust its behavioural outputs accordingly.

People tend to find interacting with Pepper to be a lot of fun, but it is very obviously a robot, and no-one interacting with it could reasonably be expected to mistake it for a human. It is however possible for human operators observing Pepper's interactions with a human to remotely type in speech that directly and appropriately responds to the human and is spoken by Pepper. This kind of manual intervention can provide an entertaining illusion, much as a magic trick would, if the human interacting with the robot is not aware of the presence of the operator. It can be a useful standby at shows and exhibitions where the background noise is too great for Pepper to hear and respond to what is being said to it effectively. But it is not true artificial intelligence of course.

10. Should one refer to Pepper as 'he' or 'she'? Is Pepper male or female?

Overall, Pepper has somewhat androgynous features, with a head that looks more obviously robotic than possessed of a gender, a relatively flat upper body that might more often be assumed a hallmark of a male than a female, but a hip-to-waist area ratio that usually creates a more feminine impression.

The men in our office used to commonly refer to Pepper as 'he' and 'him', but the external consensus seems to be that, as one of our Twitter followers insisted, 'Pepper is a girl'.

Ultimately, Pepper is a machine, and therefore a dispassionate scientist would probably prefer 'it', a practice to which I am adhering for the purposes of this interview. But since the whole idea of social robotics is to program robots to interact with humans in a way that creates a pleasant social experience, and people are prone to divide up their social worlds into genders, it is understandable that most prefer to use either the male or the female pronouns, depending on their perceptions.

11. Can one observe Pepper or other robots you work with getting smarter / accumulating knowledge?

One can observe Pepper tracking its environment, and it can permanently learn the layout of the location where it is kept by moving around it and detecting obstacles, then committing a map of the environment to memory. However, its self-learning abilities from interactions with humans are relatively limited, and by and large to improve either the apparent intelligence of its behaviour or its knowledge base requires improvements in custom programming.

12. What characteristics does Pepper have? Does he have them or does he display them? How do you know the difference?

I think I covered many of Pepper's behavioural characteristics in outline under question 9. above.

I think it is reasonable to say that even a machine can have characteristics. A characteristic is merely a defining feature. You know the difference between a possessed characteristic and a displayed characteristic according to whether or not there are outwardly manifest signs of it. Some characteristics of a robot will be manifestly displayed through its behaviour, while others may be highly technical ones that are outwardly invisible to the general public or the end-user but known to the hardware and software developers that have worked on the device. I would contend that a displayed characteristic is still a characteristic, even if it is designed to convey an illusion of autonomous intelligence that is not really there.

It may be worth mentioning Pepper's mechanical characteristics at this juncture. Pepper contains many joints. It has fingers with multiple separately angled imitation finger bones, so it can curl up its hands and uncurl them again in quite a human-like manner. It can tilt its waist at different angles, and is especially good at moving its arms and neck. However, it does not have feet, and when it 'decides' to move, it simply speeds off on its wheeled base, either until it detects a risk of collision, or until it 'decides' to stop again for some other reason. Its motors allow it to move in four different directions.

13. Can Pepper display a social intelligence?

Yes, but only within limited parameters. It can for instance flash its eyes in different colours to represent emotions, and respond to the proximity of people in ways that appear reasonably natural, for example by avoiding hazardous collisions but accepting gentle contact by people who are not behaving aggressively. However, if you compared a robot like Pepper with a real, live pet like a dog or cat in comparable situations, the social intelligence of the real pet would be observed to be vastly superior to that of the robot.

14. Do you think we will ever live in a world where robots can do anything a human can do?

If by 'anything' is meant 'at least one thing', then we already got there in the earliest days of the development of robotics. But if by 'anything' is meant 'everything', then no, we will never live in such a world. There will always be aspects of human experience that depend on our nature as organic life-forms.

15. Do you think the Turing test is still a reliable way to determine the intelligence level of AI?

I referred to a hypothetical test akin to the traditional Turing test in my response to 7. above. I think that generically this kind of blind user experience test is an important kind of test for determining the subjectively perceived sophistication of artificial intelligence. But the devil is in the detail, and a great many tests of this character are likely to fail to differentiate as effectively as a human would in a natural situation.

If the Turing test requires a particular, pre-scripted set of questions devised by an assessor to be asked, then it is only as good or as useful as that set of questions, and should be relatively easy to 'game' by a programming team with the time and budget to devise answers to every conceivable common human question.

If, however, the blind user charged with the task of trying to determine which of the two devices being interacted with is operated by a live human and which is not is permitted to ask a different set of questions to each, and to build from one question to the next in an entirely natural way depending on the previous answers given, or to jump on a whim to a different kind of question altogether, at will, it should be more likely that the A. I. device will exhibit unnatural behaviour in its patterns of response than that the human operator will - provided that the human operator is not obtuse or unusually socially stilted in manners, which might tend to a false positive impression that he / she is in fact an A. I. device.

So overall, Turing-type tests are a generically useful methodology, but a huge amount of careful thought and planning needs to go into the detail of their design, execution and interpretation in order for the data they generate to be reliably meaningful in the ways that it is supposed to be. Much the same is arguably true of virtually any experiment in psychology.

L-R: former GWS developer Tom Bellew; Pepper Robot; GWS director David Graves
Pictured in August 2016

16. If a robot such as Pepper were destroyed, would that result in an emotional loss for you or any of the people that Pepper works with?

That would probably depend on the manner and spirit of the act of destruction. We actually had this happen once already in a way, as did all other registered owners of Pepper, about a year ago. Softbank Robotics announced a recall for a hardware upgrade of all Pepper units. In practice, this entailed the one we had being collected by a courier and returned to Softbank Robotics for recycling and disposal, while an entirely new unit was sent in its place just days after it was collected. So the Pepper we have now is not the same Pepper we began with. Physically, it's a completely different object. It just looks roughly the same, and has most of the same characteristics. It's certainly faster to respond and to move than the original Pepper was, so it's a clear upgrade, but it is not the same device.

I don't recall anyone in the office getting at all upset over the loss of the original Pepper and its replacement with a new one. It would be a bit like getting upset by a familiar computer or telephone giving up working and needing to be replaced.

People can get attached to electronic devices that they interact with a lot, just as children can get attached to their toys in which they invest imaginary personalities, or grown-ups can get attached to their furniture, houses, or objets d'art. But replacing one machine with another of the same basic design that looks and behaves in almost exactly the same way does not seem to upset people so much as the loss of a belonging felt to be unique (at least to their life experience).

People who work with robots have to be logical in their approach to them in order to get good results from them, and that same quality of logic probably tends to an unsentimental manner when faced with the replacement of one robot by another.

If, however, a robot such as our Pepper were destroyed by malice or violence, the reactions of our team would conceivably be quite different because of the spirit of the act of destruction being a malign one, whereas with the Pepper upgrade programme this clearly was not the case.

Ultimately, it is reasonable for people to feel emotional loss when they are abandoned by loved ones or when loved ones die, but love is best reserved for truly sentient beings such as humans and other animals, which benefit from and arguably deserve it.

Dispassionately viewed, attachment to robots, cuddly toys and other inanimate objects invested with personalities by their owners and keepers is purely a function of projection.

17. Do you believe people have good reason to fear AI machines going rogue?

Yes, to the degree that AI machines can be developed and programmed by irresponsibly negligent or criminally rogue humans.

In the absence of sufficient regulatory oversight, robots could be designed or programmed as killing machines. It is really of paramount importance that lawmakers legislate to prevent these scenarios from becoming commonplace in the future.

The related risk of robots being negligently allowed to turn rogue by being given too free a rein to learn and act on destructive impulses (albeit ones ultimately driven by their programming) is one of the reasons why I'm an outspoken opponent of the idea promoted by a working committee of the E.U. Parliament in 2016-17 that robots should be granted electronic personhood.

The establishment in law of any kind of legal get-out clause that could exonerate the makers and programmers of robots from responsibility for the damages they may cause to humans by shifting the responsibility to the robot itself on the pretext that it is an autonomous person would be a colossal mistake.

By requiring the manufacturers and programmers of robots to build in safeguards that prevent them from causing harm to others, and making these parties legally liable for any harm caused to a human by a robot they have worked on, lawmakers can play a valuable role in guiding the ethical development of AI far into the future.

Unfortunately, the temptation of some governments and terrorist groups around the world to develop sophisticated lethal autonomous weapons capable of using artificial intelligence to select and launch fire at targets is a danger that looms large across the future and, if allowed to prevail, will undoubtedly blight the wider public image of robotics, which in itself is an ethically neutral bank of technical knowledge that can equally be used for good or evil. It is incumbent on us to lobby politicians at all levels of government to help to ensure that robotics and A.I. are only used for good.

18. Do you believe it would be ethical for an AI machine to pose as a human?

No, if the intention was truly to deceive people into believing that the AI machine was human, that would be profoundly unethical, just as it is unethical for one human to pose as another human in order to deceive.

This does not, however, mean that it is unethical to develop robots with a physical likeness to humans, as has already been done to a remarkable degree by Hanson Robotics with its creations such as Sophia. Context is all-important. Robots like Sophia are extremely impressive exponents of state-of-the-art mechanical and material robotics design, and artificial intelligence. But they are used to entertain and not to deceive, and there is nothing wrong with entertaining in a good spirit.

19. Is it right to turn off forever, or otherwise destroy, an artificially intelligent machine when it can no longer function as it was designed to?

It is neither wrong nor necessarily the only option. It is not wrong because it is still a machine and not a life-form. We should be much more concerned about animals held in captivity for scientific experiments and product research being involuntarily killed, or 'euthanised', than we should about broken robots being dismantled and recycled. Such animals may have reached the point in their lives when they can no longer provide useful data to scientists, but that doesn't make it right to kill them - they should be set free or retired to a wildlife park that will take reasonable care of them.

It is not necessarily the only option because the machine could be reworked with new parts, just as old cars with worn-out parts can usually be got on the road again by the selective replacement of worn-out parts, as an alternative to being consigned to the scrap metal yard.

20. Do you think it is right to turn off forever or otherwise destroy an artificially intelligent machine when it has outlived its usefulness to its owner?

I think I covered this largely in my answer to question 1. above. While there is nothing particularly right about this, there is nothing inherently wrong with turning off an artificially intelligent machine either. What is more problematic is the potential waste of materials and the resources that went into producing them. If the machine is still useful, it would preferably be passed on to someone else who would gain value from using it. If not, then its parts should be recycled.

The post Robot Ethics and Pepper: Twenty Questions appeared first on GWS Robotics.

Robot Rights and Electronic Personhood Revisited

Philip Graves — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 13:26:00 +0000

2017 has seen talk about and advocacy for granting electronic personhood and rights to advanced robots

Written by Philip Graves, June 6-7, 2017.

The text has been copy-edited for house style by David Graves, Director of GWS Robotics

Robot Rights? On the question of rights for robots and artificial intelligence

This year has seen much talk about and advocacy for granting electronic personhood to advanced robots. While some have framed this advocacy in purely legalistic terms, as a device by which to assure the correct attribution of legal responsibility for actions taken by robots and to enable insurance policies against liabilities for damages caused by these actions, others have taken it much further to imply that advanced robots should be granted true personhood, something that would be characterised by rights in addition to responsibilities.

The notion of granting any form of true personhood characterised by rights to robots, when it does not exist in law for non-human animals or other life-forms, could be seen as a rather extreme step.

Perhaps it would be helpful at this stage to attempt to analyse robot rights advocacy from a psychological perspective. What is it that makes people project human-like qualities of experience onto this particular class of non-living machines?

That robots are designed and programmed by humans to respond in real time and in a sophisticated way to external inputs and internally stored data is beyond doubt. But they are ultimately digital processors of binary code, whose output is the predictable product of pre-programmed logic gates handling binary data. It would be a stretch of human imagination to say that robots are taking decisions.

Some robots are now being developed to be equipped with contact sensors that detect a risk of damage to their physical shells and trigger an emergency response, and many others with visual input processing software that detects a risk of collision with people or other objects and triggers avoidance measures. But this does not alter the wholly digital, emotionless nature of the processing involved.

It is perhaps our readiness to project human-like qualities onto objects that appear to be behaving in certain recognisably human-like ways (as they have been programmed to do) that leads us into the perceptual trap of projecting something tantamount to conscious and sentient life onto robots.

There also appears to be a particular fascination among a number of robot developers and robot enthusiasts at the prospect of ultimately creating true independent consciousness in these machines, albeit from artificial beginnings, through the development of ever-more-sophisticated robot designs and programming. This fascination may give rise to a desire to actively experiment to achieve this.

Other voices are driven less by this desire and more by fear that sophisticated robots could develop autonomous consciousness of a kind that ethically requires their being granted rights by society, in order to protect them from various forms of perceived cruelty, such as slavery, confinement, restricted self-determination and freedom, and externally imposed ‘death’, whether through the removal of their power source or their final disassembly.

Some have argued that future robots will be designed to mimic a full range of human emotions. This prospect raises at least three questions:

Firstly, whether or not the simulated emotions engender real pleasure and pain at a conscious experiential level for the robot. To this question, our answer would be almost certainly not, provided that it is a robot, and not some kind of a bioengineered hybrid of living tissue with digital processing technology – since robots by themselves are non-living machines, being essentially digital code hardware processors controlled by digital programs to drive and draw data from mechanical appendages;
Secondly, to what degree it is even ethical, and at what point it may become unethically misleading, to set out to create, or to permit in law the creation of, robots that simulate the expression of complex emotions such as physical pain, grief, anger and love in a lifelike and persuasive way. Such a lifelike simulation of emotion could give suggestible human onlookers the illusion that these robots are experiencing real human emotions, and elevate their imagined status in the eyes of such onlookers to one of sentient beings with concomitant rights. Could such a focus unhealthily distract from the granting of due rights to truly sentient beings such as other animals, as well as to the whole of humanity itself?
Thirdly, to what degree it would be ethical, in the event that we were able to generate true autonomous and sentient consciousness in artificial creations such as robots, with or without the integration of bioengineering, to subject creations of this kind to the experiencing of emotions as a product of their engineering and programming. With the generation of the ability to experience pain in an artificially engineered creation of any character would come a responsibility of care that would at least match that inherent in any pet-keeping or animal-husbandry relationship. This consideration by itself raises a host of problematic ethical issues at the level of research and development, before we even consider the practical implications of letting loose artificially intelligent life forms in the hands of corporate entities or the general public.

Advocates of rights for advanced robots contend that these rights should include the right to preservation and rights to autonomy. See for example the recently published article by George Dvorsky in which he reiterates his earlier robot rights manifesto to be applied to all robots that are said to ‘pass the personhood threshold’. The rights for robots that are claimed by Dvorsky comprise:

The right not to be disabled against their will
The right fully to know their own source code
The right not to have their source code changed against their will
The right to self-duplication, or to refuse to be duplicated
The right to privacy of their own ‘internal mental states’

But to establish such rights for robots could be extremely dangerous for humanity, elevating robots, which are essentially machines constructed and initially programmed by humans, to the status of organic beings over which we have no right of control.

We widely control and limit the range of dangerous wild animals in human habitats for our own preservation. But robots can potentially and unpredictably be programmed and equipped by humans with all manner of destructive weaponry that exceeds the dangers from wild animals whose behaviours are limited by nature and are known to us.

To accord rights of autonomy and preservation to these machines that we have built to serve us would be a recipe for creating chaotic consequences. The abuse of robot programming potential by programmers and operators to violent and criminal ends is just one potential scenario. The dystopian scenarios of science fiction in which robots are enabled and permitted to rule over human society should not even be given a foot-hold for actualisation in reality.

Collectively, we ought to legislate for and regulate robots from the standpoint that they are machines (a point echoed by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times last month) under full human responsibility, without independent rights, and machines whose actions remain the responsibility of their developers and operators.

We further disagree with Dvorsky’s concluding arguments that granting rights to robots would ‘set an important precedent’ in favour of general social cohesion, justice, protection of humans against a disastrous ‘AI backlash’, and the protection of ‘other types of emerging persons’. Social cohesion, justice, and the protection of other ‘types of persons’ are ends in themselves that can be pursued on their own merits and approached directly. It is neither inherently necessary nor desirable to accord rights to machines as a precedent to the attainment of truly worthy social goals.

The post Robot Rights and Electronic Personhood Revisited appeared first on GWS Robotics.

7 Star Trek Technologies Made Real in the 21st Century

Philip Graves — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 14:12:00 +0000

Seven imaginary technologies represented in vintage episodes of the cult Sci-fi series Star Trek that have since to a greater or lesser degree been implemented in reality.

This article was written by Carling Knight and David Graves of GWS Robotics, on April 6th, 2017.
It was copy-edited prior to publication by Philip Graves on April 21st, 2017.

1. Communications badge

Overview

The type of communications badge used in The Next Generation now not only exists in a closely matching design, but is available to purchase! The real-world version of the badge allows you to communicate through Bluetooth, so you can take phone calls and reply to messages. You can also access your phone’s virtual assistant through it – just as the computer is used in the series.

For example, you might say: “Okay, Google, turn the lights on!”

In the show

The show has had some iteration of these since the first season. They operate as a means of communicating between crew members; but additionally they record information on the crew members’ health and their location.

To communicate, the crew member simply taps the badge and then says the name of the person they are trying to contact, and a voice communication line is started. Generally, the crew member would say the name of the person they are trying to contact and a small subject line. This is then played to the target, who can choose how to answer.

In real life

The communicator badge on the linked website works perfectly as a Bluetooth communications device. You can even tap the badge to activate your phone's virtual assistant, resulting in Google or Siri asking you what you would like to do. From there, you can call someone, and the call will be routed through to the communications badge, allowing you to talk just as they would on Star Trek.

Currently, the commercially available communicator badge can’t do location tracking or health monitoring. However, modern smartwatches are fitted with GPS, heart-rate monitors, microphones, and everything that would be needed to complete the functionality of the communications badge. It’s surely now just a matter of time until someone fits everything into the same form factor of the communications badge that is existingly for sale.

2. Virtual Display Device

Overview

In Star Trek, a virtual display device is used by the Jem’Hadar and their Dominion Overlords as a means of controlling their ships. It sits over the wearer’s eye, creating a virtual field in front of you, and allowing you to look through the ship’s hull.

This is identical in function to the Microsoft HoloLens, which creates virtual objects that mix in with the real world.

In the show

The devices are used to control the Jem’Hadar ships. In the show, the first of the Jem’Hadar units wears one, along with the Vorta commander in charge of that cell.

They allow the user to look directly through the hull of the ship, giving a situational awareness advantage over traditional sensor readouts. However, they were designed specifically for the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta, and give other species severe headaches when they attempt to use them.

In real life

The Microsoft HoloLens is a technology that is technically classed as augmented reality. It doesn’t require you to block out the real world around you as a true VR device like the HTC Vive would. Instead, it adds virtual objects around you.

For example, a globe can be moved around and controlled by the user with hand gestures. Or if you had a TV in the augmented world, you could increase the size by simply dragging the corners wider. This is identical in practice to the Virtual Display Device in Star Trek, that served the needs of users to interact with the world around them at the same time as being able to look through the ship's hull.

3. Automatic Doors

Overview

This is a technology that many people take for granted nowadays, because automatic doors are everywhere.

Imaginary automatic sliding door technology was presented in the original series of Star Trek long before the technology existed in reality.

In 2017, most urban environments include doors that open automatically for you.

In the show vs. in real life

Today’s real automatic doors work by means of a small sensor above a door that detects when a person approaches, activating motors to slide or swing the door open.

This technology is identical to that used in the doors on the show. The main difference is that the doors on the show were typically exceptionally strong, being able to withstand huge impacts and immense heat. However, this mostly comes down to the type of material envisaged: we haven’t invented the material needed for these properties yet.

In the original series of Star Trek in 1966, the technology did not yet exist but was represented as though it did. The cast had no way of opening the supposedly automatic doors, so two members of the production crew were used to manually pull them apart behind the scenes whenever cast members walked up to them. They had to lie down and pull the doors open as the cast walked up to them. This is why, if you watch closely, you’ll often see one door open more quickly than the other one!

4. Klingon Language

Overview

The Klingon language is now an official language. What’s more, Duolingo, a service dedicated to teaching languages for free, have begun developing a program for it to allow anyone to learn Klingon. This is slated for release in 2018.

In the show and in real life

The Klingon language is described in Star Trek as an exceptionally harsh language with very few ways of saying basic niceties like ‘thank you’. It’s not that the Klingons are rude, although they do come across as that by the standards of most other races – it comes down to them being entirely focused on war and combat, as a result of which they do not deem it necessary to say things like ‘thank you’.

The language itself was fleshed out by the show’s creators; but fans took it to the next stage of development.

If you learn the Klingon language, you can even get to understand the parts of the shows that were spoken in Klingon without being given subtitles.

5. Tractor Beams

Overview

Tractor beams were used by almost every ship in the Star Trek universe, the idea being an energy force that can pull or push objects away from the ship.

A Bristol engineering team has successfully developed a method of achieving this through sound waves.

In the show

These devices were used by ships, docking platforms and heavy equipment for manipulating physical objects through energy fields.

The basic premise is that the energy field acts as a net around an object, which can then be moved around. These fields were exceptionally strong, to the point of being capable of essentially warp-towing a disabled ship.

There were also a few instances in the show where the engineers were able to repurpose them to form energy shields, or simply to push objects away from the ship.

In real life

Sadly, the energy net aspect of the hypothetical technology is not identical to the real-life method that has been developed. Instead, the real-life equivalent uses sound waves. The Bristol-based engineering team is able to ‘grab’ beads using sound waves, pulling them back and forth, to the effect of levitating the objects around.

While this is certainly far away from what was envisaged as being achievable in the Star Trek implementation, it is a good beginning.

6. Deviceless Control

Overview

In Star Trek, the cast often controls computers with regular buttons. However, in newer iterations, they simply swipe messages away and perform actions without ever touching a screen.

This is a technology that is available for purchase today in the form of the Leap Motion controller.

In the show

These types of devices aren’t seen in the earlier shows often, since they didn’t yet have the graphical technology needed to represent them effectively during the filming of the shows.

However, they have begun making an appearance in the newer movies, where the crew members are able to control objects on a monitor by simply swiping left and right, manipulating the objects by pulling and pushing.

In real life

The Leap Motion controller is a fantastic first shot at this, allowing users to control their display using their hands. It’s even starting to advance into new territory by tying this into existing VR solutions, allowing for the manipulation of virtual objects using your hands.

7. Renewable Energy

Overview

Star Trek heralds the creation of the antimatter reactor as the way that they generate massive amounts of clean, free energy. However, there is also a great emphasis on renewable sources such as wind energy throughout the series.

In the show

Within Star Trek, we see antimatter powering the USS Enterprise and most of the other starships. However, this isn’t the only power source available. In fact, we see things like tidal barrages and wind turbines throughout most of the series.

One of the earlier episodes features a ‘paradise’-like planet, which is littered with wind turbines in the background, demonstrating how the population are able to keep the planet looking amazingly clean while still supplying all of the energy that the inhabitants need.

In real life

Aside from antimatter drives, Star Trek doesn’t really focus on the ways the characters generate their electricity. Instead, we see recognisable renewable sources throughout the show. In fact, a Ferengi makes a confused comment about how it doesn’t understand how early humans could pollute their own planet.

The human race has the ability to create all of these technologies - and we are, albeit slowly! With further research in this area, we could even overtake Star Trek’s envisioned implementations of renewable energy.

The post 7 Star Trek Technologies Made Real in the 21st Century appeared first on GWS Robotics.

Softbank Robotics Pepper Robot Exhibition Pepper World Paris

Philip Graves — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 13:29:00 +0000

Pepper World Paris event took place on April 20-21, 2017

Carling Knight and David Graves of GWS Robotics report on the exhibition.

The Pepper World Paris event was hosted by SoftBank Robotics at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, a large science museum located in the Pont-de-Flandre district within the 19^th arondissement of Paris.

The museum is focused on exploring the recent advances in science and industry, and includes various showrooms. It is serviced by an extensive series of restaurants dotted alongside the showrooms.

The building itself is architecturally impressive, with a futuristic design, featuring large amounts of metal and glass intertwined with water fountains around the outside.

It is further surrounded by the Parc de la Villette, a sea of green amid the grey architecture of the city. The effect is an impression that leaves you thinking of the integration of technology with a healthy environment, two aspirations that might be seen as difficult to reconcile.

This was a very appropriate setting in which to host a conference dedicated to the future of a robot whose aim is to give people friendly assistance with the business of their day.

The event itself was hosted in Le Loft, a showroom within the museum that, with the sheer scale of the building as a whole, felt like an underground venue. This sense applies to the rest of the building too: rooms felt like bunkers thanks to the scale.

Within Le Loft, SoftBank had positioned 36 partner booths with Pepper robots ready to go. We arrived earlier than most of the visitors, so when we walked through the crowd of Peppers, they turned their heads to look up to us as we passed by.

SoftBank Robotics Partners are companies that have agreed to a close business relationship with SoftBank. To qualify for Partner status, companies must support SoftBank’s business development goals and communicate the same brand messages. A Partner shares publicity for SoftBank promoting the adoption of robots in business and leisure environments.

Most of the Softbank Partners at the event were present on the first day. 36 of them had booths demonstrating the work that they had been doing on Pepper, while the others were present to discuss their work.

SoftBank kicked the event off with a choreographed dance featuring six Peppers. They performed a complicated dance routine to some suitably robotic music. You can see five of the six ’dancers’ below taking a quick breather while the speaker began his talk.

Carrefour, Renault and AXA Bank then gave presentations describing what they had learned in their experiences with deployment of Pepper robots in their own business premises. Carrefour described how they had initially launched Pepper robots running six applications in their stores; then after assessing the popularity and usage levels of each, they pared this down to the three that are most popular, which remain in active use. These are a simple chat with Pepper, some simple games, and a wine advisor. Carrefour found that while the wine advisor had the fewest interactions of the three applications it decided to retain, it had the longest interaction time, whereas the quick chat was interacted with at a higher frequency but the period of interaction was shorter.

Renault described how they had successfully deployed 113 Pepper robots across their showrooms, demonstrating similar apps to those of Carrefour. For the most part, they reported that Pepper was serving as a catalogue or as an interesting way to engage children while their parents visited showrooms. AXA Bank reported very similar findings to those of Renault.

One of the Partners demonstrated an incredible combination of hand-tracking and virtual reality by allowing you to see through Pepper’s eyes and move his arms by moving yours! The demonstration was impressive, showing the potential for future robots to enter areas that would be hazardous for humans while being completely and intuitively controllable by a human being.

ZoraBots demonstrated a time-saving payments system they had developed that would allow Pepper to walk up to people in a queue and take their order, and then take payment for it before they even reached the counter.

SoftBank now have more than 70 Partners, with most of those coming on board in 2016. They have become increasingly partner-facing in their strategic business orientation: by supporting their partners, they can increase the value and popularity of Pepper.

As the first day drew to a close, Pepper World Paris was over as a public event. The second day was an exclusive conference between SoftBank and the Partners. Throughout this day, SoftBank covered their future plans in terms of business, software and hardware. There is a number of exciting developments in the works.

The post Softbank Robotics Pepper Robot Exhibition Pepper World Paris appeared first on GWS Robotics.

Should we tax robots? Response to Robert Shiller article in The Guardian

Philip Graves — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 13:55:00 +0000

Response to Robert Shiller's call for the taxation of robots

Written by Philip Graves, GWS Robotics, March 31st, 2017

This article has been selectively edited by David Graves, Creative Director of GWS Robotics

In The Guardian, Wednesday 22^nd March, 2017, U.S. economist Robert Shiller argues for the taxation of robots on the grounds that they are a ‘labor-displacing innovation’ that will lead to job losses.

Acknowledging that ‘retraining programs for displaced workers’ may be essential public policy, Shiller sensibly goes on to invoke the human and community importance of maintaining paid work.

However, we tend to disagree with the proposition that the use of robots should be taxed in order to restrict job losses in particular market sectors.

In the fluid, internationally competitive globalised 21^st century economy, structural changes to the job market are driven by market forces, and attempting to intervene with those market forces to artificially stop job losses in a particular sector, while it may provide short-term personal income security and vocational continuity for the workers at risk of redundancy, is unfortunately a recipe for longer-term economic damage to the national economy that takes such measures.

Among the market forces at work in today’s globalised economy is the internationally competitive drive to produce products and services as efficiently as possible. The more efficient producers of the same products and services will tend to succeed in the international marketplace, while the less efficient ones will fail because of their need to charge higher prices to meet the higher costs of production, or if they cannot be profitable at the lower prices set by the competition.

For over 500 years, advances in automation, from printing presses replacing the laborious hand-written reproduction of manuscripts, through automated telephone exchanges replacing the previous manually operated switchboards, to continuously editable computerised databases replacing hand-typed documents, have continually driven up the efficiency of production in business.

The economic effects of increased efficiency of production are mostly positive ones. These include lower consumer prices for each product or service as a proportion of average income, thereby bringing more services and products within the reach of each individual. They also include reduced working hours to create the same output; and, where manual labour is concerned, a trend towards less harsh physical labour.

Robotisation is a relatively recent chapter in this long-standing trend of using machinery and technology to drive up the efficiencies of production and lower the costs of goods and services. But it is nonetheless comparable, and we think it will be similar in its economic effects to previous advances in automation.

Where automation leads to a reduced need for workers in a particular market sector, the money saved by industry on salaries will be retained in and ultimately cycled back within the economy as expenditure on other products or services. In economics parlance, this is called the conservation of a constant total value of economic resources per head of population, such as average spending power and available worker hours.

More money will be retained by consumers of the products and services whose production has been automated, as a result of reduced purchase costs for those products and services, leaving those consumers more money to spend on other products and services; or it will be retained by the owners or shareholders of the businesses producing them and recycled partly through greater government tax receipts from personal incomes and business profits, and partly through greater expenditure and investment by the beneficiaries of higher incomes and profits. Where the saved money ends up being redistributed within the economy, there is the potential for new jobs to be created, replacing those that have been lost.

Shiller also quotes Edmund S Phelps in according great personal importance to the ‘calling’ of the individual. Yet the notion that everyone should be able to choose where and how to work in response to personal vocation is economically unrealistic because the supply of willing labour for certain types of employment exceeds the demand for labour in these fields. In the fields of entertainment and creative arts, where the number of willing producers and performers of music, performing arts, fine art and literature exceeds the market capacity, many aspiring musicians, writers, artists and other performers cannot make a living from their calling. Those market forces are essentially similar to the market forces at work when jobs are lost in particular sectors and job opportunities created in others. In the free-market economy, the onus is on labour to adapt to the opportunities available, and not on industry to adapt to the desires of labour for jobs in particular areas whether or not there is money available to make those jobs viable. Demand dictates where labour opportunities are available.

Shiller’s desire to reduce income inequality is laudable. But selectively taxing robots, which are to a greater or lesser degree a part of the means of production in certain industrial sectors only, is not an equitable means to this end, and we doubt it would be an economically effective one.

It is not equitable because automation that increases the efficiency of production and reduces the need for labour to achieve a given level of production does not consist exclusively or even mainly in the use of robots. In fact, automation exists in degrees on a continuous spectrum from hand-operated weaving machines serving as aids to the efficiency of clothing producers, through to fully automated production line assemblies, with computerised data flows and telecommunications also serving to automate communications that would previously have required a great deal more labour. It would be impossible to meaningfully and reliably quantify the amount of labour saved by automation of all kinds; and selectively taxing only certain types of automation responding to narrowly defined parameters would be arbitrary and lead to economic injustice, with limits being set to the forms of automation that are being taxed based on emotion.

It is unlikely to be economically effective because it is very hard to conceive of the implementation of a global international consensus on the taxation of robots. Unlike environmental policy, for which there is a well-established framework of international co-operation and agreement, tax policy remains a matter for national or regional supranational governments. If robots are taxed only in the UK, or only in the EU, or only in the USA, for example, but not in South East Asia, the businesses operating in the territories that have taxed their use will be put at a disadvantage in the international marketplace, their prices undercut by those operating in countries that do not tax the use of robots. As a consequence, jobs in the industrial sectors where robots are in use will in any case be lost in the countries where robots have been taxed. Taxing the means of production could spell disaster for international competitiveness.

Another reason why it is unlikely to be economically effective in the countries where it is implemented is that it will be slowing down the economic development of those countries by artificially propping up the labour market in certain industrial sectors or companies that are no longer viable, at the expense of job creation in other areas, and at the expense of overall economic growth and prosperity.

There are tried and tested means to address economic inequality that do not involve the introduction of economic distortions and inequities such as those that would result from a selective tax on robots or other means of production. For example, the use of properly calibrated progressive personal income tax rates with a tax-free personal allowance; a zero-tolerance policy towards corporate tax evasion and offshore tax havens; fair national living wage regulations; and a social security net to protect those excluded from adequately remunerative employment by market forces. It is ultimately up to each country to decide where the right economic balance lies in all those areas and to legislate accordingly.

This decision-making process belongs to the domain of politics. But whatever decisions are taken should be applied fairly and impartially across the board. Singling out certain arbitrarily delimited means of production such as forms of automation meeting a particular definition of ‘robots’ for special penalties would be retrogressive, not progressive, from the standpoint of the desire to build a fairer society.

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Are robots going to steal all our jobs?

Philip Graves — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 14:01:45 +0000

Thoughts on whether robots will ‘take human jobs’

Written by Philip Graves, GWS Robotics, January 27th, 2017

The original text of this article has been selectively edited for ease of reading by David Graves, Creative Director of GWS Robotics.
It was further slightly edited for clarity by the original author on March 22nd, 2017.

There is something of a panic in some quarters about the risk of human jobs being taken by robots in the future.

So perhaps we should stop to consider what kinds of jobs may be at risk, and how economies have adapted previously to moves away from labour-intensive production processes.

In all areas of primary and secondary industry - from agriculture, mining, cable-laying and construction, to manufacturing, fabric-making and food processing – machinery for automated production and operations has been under continual development since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 19^th century. Over the past two centuries, its capabilities and efficiencies have improved in leaps and bounds. The number of worker-hours required to achieve a given level of productivity has markedly declined, at the same time as the total scale of industrial production and operations per person has enormously increased.

In the twentieth century, operational efficiencies and automation improved faster than demand for production increased, so there was a progressive decline in the proportion of the British workforce that needed to be employed in primary and secondary industries in order to meet all the production demands. Allied to the increasing globalisation of the industrial economy and the lower costs of production in poorer countries, this led to significant shedding of jobs in industrial sectors in the United Kingdom. But the jobs lost from these industries have been replaced with new ones in other sectors, chiefly in the service economy.

A certain level of unemployment is an almost universal feature of the modern, capital-intensive post-industrial economy. But another twentieth century trend, and one that is entirely to be lauded and welcomed by society as a move in the direction of greater economic fairness between the sexes (though inequalities remain to this day), has been the movement of most adult women into the labour market, as compared with only a minority at the beginning of the century. The national census of 1911 records that women accounted for only 29% of the British workforce at that time, with 5.85 million women ‘occupied’ as compared with 14.3 million men^[1]. The rate of employment among married women in 1911 was just 10%.

The trend to fuller female employment has continued into the 21^st century. The Office for National Statistics records that in the summer of 2016, economic inactivity among British women aged 16-64 had reached a record low of 26.8%, compared with 44.5% when records began in early 1971. This reduction in female working-age unemployment over the past 45 years has more than counterbalanced the moderate increase in male working-age unemployment over the same period (it rose from from 4.9% to 16.5%). So in 2016, the overall proportion of British working-age adults in paid employment was marginally higher than it had been back in 1971 despite advances in automation and reduced demand for labour in traditional industrial sectors.

This history shows that when advances in automation take away jobs in some areas, the labour economy is adaptable enough to rebalance itself in the medium-to-long term. New economic sectors that demand personnel open up. The service, leisure, travel and entertainment economies are among the areas that have benefitted from increasingly automated industrial processes. In terms of gross domestic product per head, the economy has grown with automation. And in terms of jobs, it has remained stable in the national and longer-term view despite regional and sector-level declines.

As more and more robots are used in industry, we can expect a continuation of these pre-existing trends. Robots will of course directly replace some existing jobs, but they will also free those parts of the workforce up to work in other areas, though this process may be painful. Money saved by automation in industry should find its way back into the economy as spending and investment power in other sectors, allowing them to employ more people.

It is also likely that some futurologists have been promoting an exaggerated picture of just how many of the jobs undertaken by humans today can satisfactorily and fully be replaced by robots in the next fifty years. From a customer service perspective, for instance, robots will chiefly be creating added value by providing additional information and entertainment, just as home computers and Internet services do today. They will not by themselves satisfy the keenly-felt human demand for service with a smile from a congenial real person.

Robots will always be most useful doing the most boring, repetitive, mechanical and dangerous jobs. We believe that deploying robots in these areas will be of real human benefit, freeing a great many employees from drudgery and unpleasant working conditions. When the economy rebalances in due course, it is likely that new jobs will be the result.

Robots will require development, programming, servicing and monitoring, all of which jobs have to be done by people. So each robot deployed will not in fact be replacing a whole person’s job, even before the economic rebalancing that occurs after jobs are lost in any particular industrial sector.

On a personal and local community level, job cuts and factory closures can of course be a great shock and a tragedy for people where they occur. Such changes seem to be an inevitable part of a modern economy run on competitive free-market principles, and in this respect, increased automation may have a similar effect to competition from companies based abroad. Both central and local government social policy should, however, be ready to step in to make sure that the needs of individuals and communities affected by loss of employment in particular industrial sectors are met. Investment in retraining schemes for individuals and economic regeneration programmes for urban areas that have suffered from the loss of major employers are among the tools that should be used to facilitate the process of adaptation to sectoral job losses as painlessly as possible.

How does the economy rebalance itself after sectoral job losses?

How do we demonstrate that jobs lost to machinery are eventually replaced with new ones in other sectors, mainly the service economy? Economies naturally self-balance in that way over time because of there being certain economic constants such as the total amount of spending power and labour time per head in the economy as a whole. These constants dictate that economic savings in one area translate into opportunities for expenditure in another.

So, if the advent of automated processes leads to 50% of jobs being lost in a particular industry, either the prices of that industry’s output will fall in line with the savings on labour costs, as a result of which the people who habitually buy that output will find they have more money left to make purchases of other things (e.g. services), or, if the prices stay the same, the money saved on production will, as profit, find its way back into the economy sooner or later in the form of expenditure by the owners, directors and shareholders, and (provided that fiscal policy is properly configured by central government) as tax. This saved money is then available sooner or later for the purchase of other products and services. What dictates the kinds of products and services that are bought when money is saved on the labour costs of industrial production will vary hugely according to the tastes and habits of the times, but the sectors where there is demand will be the ones that grow and create new jobs.

There is generally no simple and direct migration of jobs from one particular industry into another. But historically we have seen the services sector collectively being the main beneficiary of the decline of employment in traditional primary and secondary industries.

See for example the publication in June 2013 by the Office for National Statistics of the document ‘170 Years of Industrial Change across England and Wales’.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/170-years-of-industry/170-years-of-industrial-changeponent.html

This states that in 1841, 36% of jobs were in manufacturing, 22% were in agriculture and fishing, and 33% in services, whereas by 2011, only 9% of jobs were in manufacturing, 1% were in agriculture and fishing, and 81% were in services.

In short, as food and industrial production becomes more efficient in terms of labour, there is more money to go round for expenditure on services, and as a result, demand for employment in service industries increases.

[1] Hogg, Sallie Heller ‘The Employment of Women in Great Britain 1891-1921’ (1967)

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