Robots - Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Guardian today carries an article about robots: Dawn of the age of the robot .

So what’s new? Technology has arrived. Is here. Will be coming.

Soon, to a life near yours.

We have seem movies of machine-tools automatically spray-painting car bodies.

We’ve seen movies of automated carriers of parts navigating the shop floor.

We’ve seen movies of pilotless drones scanning the ground from clear blue skies in Afghanistan.

Some of us have mastered Cruise Control in our Toyota Camry.

Which, if any, of these examples (and others) can be said to be robotic?

My dictionary says a robot is “a machine with human appearance or functioning like a human”.

The fist part of that definition suggests a puppet; we don’t worry about that.

The second part is the implied use “functioning like a human”.

Where a man-made machine assumes elements of intelligence, i.e. problem-solving, then we have a robot.

Machines that follow a fixed-set of instructions, such as spray-painting are, to my mind, not robots.

Machines which are controlled remotely such as drones are not robots; they are fly-by-wire devices.

Cruise control is not a robot.

Machines which can cope with obstacles which arrive randomly in space and time are robots.

That leaves me thinking that the true frontier lies on the shop-floor. That’s where the soccer-playing robots probably spawned. And the ballroom-dancers.

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