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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Robotics forecast: cool with a chance of lost humanity

Robot Futures examines societal implications of revolutions in tech.

You might expect a book titled Robot Futures and written by a robotics researcher to be a whiz-bang prophecy of technologies that are the best thing since sliced bread. Soon we’ll be living to 200 while traveling from vacation to vacation in our flying cars. All the while, robots handle all the parts of our jobs that we hated anyway, right? Maybe, but this book isn't the place to find it. There’s plenty of speculation in it (I mean, we are talking about the future here) but it’s decidedly more pragmatic and sober than that.

The book’s author, Illah Nourbakhsh, runs Carnegie Mellon's Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab, which “explores socially meaningful innovation and deployment of robotic technologies.” (He’s also one of the developers of the GigaPan imaging tools we highlighted recently.) The book, accompanied by Nourbakhsh’s blog of the same name, focuses on what he calls the “human side effects” of future technologies—the unexpected ways they could affect us socially and as a society.

Each chapter of the book—which progresses from the likely-seeming near future to an increasingly speculative and distant one— begins with a short, fictional story to illustrate the types of issues that could accompany a given technology. The rest of the chapter then beaks down those issues.

For example, the first chapter looks at something that might seem benign: advances in marketing. It doesn’t take much extrapolation from the present to see some pretty interesting scenarios. Marketing has undergone a data revolution online, where an unprecedented amount of information can be gathered from customers. Tools like A/B testing direct some website visitors to view a modified site, allowing providers to directly test the impacts of changes before site-wide adoption. Since this takes place automatically and provides a solid statistical analysis, it takes human judgment out of the equation to a large degree. You simply try things and let the data decide. (The book’s cover art homages the classic example of Google A/B testing 41 shades of blue.)

Customer loyalty cards have attempted to bring some of that data-gathering power into meatspace, but Nourbakhsh sees robotics—technologies that can automate perception, cognition, or action—as the real bridge. Imagine interactive advertisements that can watch you, tailoring the display to your demographic and observing your response. (Yes, Minority Report gets a shout-out.)

Nourbakhsh points to a recently piloted system for fast food drive-throughs that recognizes individuals' cars and tracks their purchasing habits. Do you always order a large serving of seasoned curly fries? The moment the camera sees you enter the parking lot, it might send your expected order to the cooks. This sort of intelligent preparation could ensure quick service while minimizing the time food spends under the heat lamps—some of which ends up in the trash after sitting too long.

The amount of incoming data would quickly swamp the ability of humans to make sense of it, so centralized software would constitute the brains behind these smart systems. Think of it as a sort of marketing AI. The result could be a kind of hyper-effective marketing that knows exactly how to push consumers’ buttons and manipulate demand. And, Nourbakhsh notes, political campaigns are sure to embrace these tools as well.

One aim of robotics development is to extend human presence in advantageous ways—like small remote-controlled robots that can search through the rubble of a collapsed building to look for trapped survivors. (Military drones constitute another, less altruistic, example.) But in a way, the more autonomous these machines are, the more useful they are. If your human operator has to control every movement, navigating a wriggling, snake-like robot through rubble can be a difficult task. What the operator really wants to do is direct the robots’ motion and let it handle the details of how to carry out those orders.

Given sufficient advancement, could this lead to functional surrogates for our presence? Could we truly have “multi-presence” in the same way we currently “multi-task”? Nourbakhsh explores how thinly this could spread our attention. He imagines someone carrying on three separate conversations around the globe at once by letting AI handle the routine stuff like pleasantries and scheduling, only alerting him to participate directly when he’s really needed. Does the ability to extend a virtual presence “dilute” what it means to be present—whether your body is there or not?

This is a question some have already raised about technologies like Google Glass, where a less-than-riveting conversation might drive someone to divert their attention to a furtive e-mail check. This only continues the digital intrusion into social interactions we already see with smart phones.

At about 120 pages, the book is a short read, but the issues raised are interesting to think about. It’s actually kind of a refreshing counterpoint to the doe-eyed ardor of many “futurists.” While it (intentionally) borders on dystopian sci-fi in spots, the aim of the book is not to instill a fear of the future. As a roboticist himself, Nourbakhsh is obviously not a back-to-the-land Luddite.

His point is that there are many directions future technology could go, including some we might regret. If military and industry funding continues to dominate robotics development, the human aspect isn't likely to be a priority. Nourbakhsh argues robotics must remain culturally-connected. That involves finding funding for projects along those lines, training young roboticists to be cognizant of the cultural side of their work, and collaborating with social scientists.

If we can do that, advances could genuinely enrich our lives and empower communities while avoiding less desirable outcomes. “In this possible robot future,” Nourbakhsh writes, “the robotics revolution can affirm the most nonrobotic quality of our world: our humanity.”

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