Skip to main content

Home/ CIS Focal Issue/ Group items tagged Humanization of Robots

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Anna Dubinina

Relationships with Robots: Good or Bad for Humans? - 0 views

  • making robots look like humans or cute animals, we may develop emotional affinity toward the machines
  • . This could help promote trust with users—but perhaps also overtrust?
  • Robots are tools, but they are tools that sometimes hold meaning for people that interact with them, or through them, as when robots are teleoperated at a distance
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In addition, sometimes robot operators insert a very clear extension of themselves into the robot, much like we see people invest in game avatars
  • I’d also categorize extending a sense of oneself into a robot as a form of attachment.
  • In ten or twenty years, when humanlike and animal-like robots are employed in a more drone-like way from a greater distance, will a similar user self-extension or new human-robot social phenomenon cause any hesitation during human-directed tasks and effect mission outcomes?
  • As AI and robots become more involved in our models of everyday life, I believe there will be a spectrum of emotional responses toward robots depending on their roles (for instance, caregiver, educator, industrial, companion, etc.) and individual user tendencies.
  • A consequence of purposeful design for attachment is that objects of attachment trigger the owner’s emotions in situations like decision making, and so can be agents of persuasion or otherwise effect someone’s actions
  • The bottom line is that these human-AI/robot interactions are transactions and not reciprocal, and therefore probably not healthy for most people to rely on as a long-term means for substituting organic two-way affectionate bonds, or as a surrogate for a human-human shared relationship
  • Is attachment to a robot problematic ethically?
Maria Gurova

Academic conference on 'Love and Sex with Robots' abruptly cancelled after being declar... - 0 views

  • Humanoid robots are now being introduced into nursing homes, and as therapists, for example. The new Hello Barbie toy will be a "friend" to children, holding conversations with young boys and girls. Robots are even getting married in Japan.
  • A perfect example of the backlash against human-like machines happened last Friday, when Adrian David Cheok and David Levy were forced to cancel their second annual Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, set to be held in Malaysia next month.
  • The case of the cancelled conference is just the beginning of the kind of obstacles intellectuals and researchers may encounter in the pursuit of academic study of humanoid robotics—an increasingly controversial field as the line between fantasy and reality gets blurred
  •  
    Two academics decided to hold a conference for a controversial matter of human robot interactions, the conference with a provocative name and a highly scientific content was banned in a very conservative and religious country of Malaysia 
Maria Gurova

Meet the Robots That Will Help Run a Tokyo Airport - 0 views

  • Last week, Japan’s ominously named robotics company Cyberdyne announced new technologies it’ll start rolling out at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in September: Two robots, one exoskeleton. One robot shuttles unwieldy luggage, another cleans the facility, and the exo assists with heavy lifting.
  • Japan’s government actively funds robotics R&D, with aims to triple the nation’s robotics market to $22 billion in the next six years, and is keen on showing off some impressive technology at Tokyo’s Summer Olympics in 2020
Anna Dubinina

How robots will reshape the economy (based on U.S. example) - 0 views

  • Few doubt that our future — both immediate and long term — will be heavily impacted by robots
  • A pair of Oxford researchers recently estimated that 47 percent of the total U.S. employment is at risk of being eliminated.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, Mercedes announced it is trading out some of its production robots for human labor — the machines could not keep up with the increasing options for customization
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • robots in the workplace will likely help reverse this trend.
  • The vast majority of automation technology will not outright replace humans; instead, it will simply make their work more efficient.
  • As the global supply chain matured, market pressures drove American companies to offshore their work to other countries that offered inexpensive labor
  • This is not to say that all white-collar workers should enroll in engineering night classes, but knowing how technology works at a base level will make you better at your job 
  • Employers need to actively promote training programs that empower employees to work more effectively with new tech.
Vladimir Antonov

The Latest Generation Atlas Humanoid Robot Is Absolutely Incredible | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • That robot you see being pushed around is the latest generation of Atlas, the insanely advanced humanoid robot as built by the Google-owned Boston Dynamics.
  • they’re hitting stuff out of Atlas’ hands and pushing him around to test its compensation systems. All that pushing and shoving only makes him stronger.
  • An average human made of metal instead of meat
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • it’s a bit closer to the weight of the average human
  • He’s a few inches shorter at 5’9″ vs 6′, but crams a bevy of sensors (LIDAR, Stereo cameras, and more) into a body that no longer needs tethers for support or power
  •  
    Humanoid robots are getting smarter, stronger and lighter, with more human-like dynamic compensation systems.
al_semenchenko

Knightscope releases fleet of autonomous crime fighting security robots - Interesting E... - 2 views

  • The 5 feet, 300 pound scooting robot is stacked with quite the resume of capabilities and because it delivers real-time data to a secure monitored location, it will minimize threats for human security officers that take on these dangerous jobs.
  • this venture gets some backing as security companies are looking for more innovative solutions to counter their turnover rates, some as high as 400%, Knightscope reports.
  • hese autonomous patrol units are doing the jobs that may be too dangerous for people and doing them better, backed with day and night 360-degree video capture, infrared and thermal scanning, proximity sensors, radar for real-time 3D mapping, and optical character recognition, allowing the K5 to never forget a face. Knightscope confirmed though that K5s are NOT intended to replace law enforcement, instead “to help and assist officers, improve response times and keep them out of harm’s way if possible.”
  •  
    Robots assisting police officers in monitoring dangerous areas. Also available for home security.
anna_nelidova

The World's First Fully Robotic Farm Opens In 2017 | Popular Science - 0 views

  • A company in Japan is building an indoor lettuce farm that will be completely tended by robots and computers.
  • The company, named Spread, expects the factory to open in 2017, and the fully automated farming process could make the lettuce cheaper and better for the environment.
  • The plants can be grown hydroponically without exhausting soil resources.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Up to 98 percent of Spread’s water will be recycled, and the factory won’t have to spray pesticides
  • Artificial lighting means the food supply won’t rely on weather variables, and the lighting can be supplied through renewable energy.
  •  
    A Japanese company plans to open a fully automated farm by 2017 that will be very efficient and not harmful for the environment. They are hoping to increase production and to reduce labor costs and company's prices. 
evgeny lavrov

1 | These Two Robots Are Very Much In Love | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation - 1 views

  • Smarter, functional robots are poised to take our job--so goes the popular narrative--but they’ll never have the emotional intelligence to approximate the complexity of human relationships. Vincent and Emily seem to ask: if robots can fight like people in love, can they one day love like them too?
alexbelov

People Are Still Getting This The Robots Will Steal All Our Jobs Thing Wrong - Forbes - 0 views

  • the new technology kills off the old jobs and that allows people to go and do something different
  • We’ve not got to make sure that the new technologies create jobs. Because that’s not what they do. Rather, they free labour to go do something else.
  • It simply isn’t true that the new technologies create jobs. That’s not what leads to us all still having jobs at least. What does happen is that we all go find other things to do. And it’s a basic tenet of economics that human desires and wants are unlimited while the resources we have to sate them are limited and scarce.
anna_nelidova

Head tracker knows what you're doing and helps you multitask | New Scientist - 1 views

  • wearable system that tracks human movements to understand what task you’re doing, how difficult it is, and when you switch to something else. His goal is to help us control our multitasking lives
  • Gathering patterns of data that describe humans doing different tasks has more potential than just helping us work more efficiently.
  • the device could turn your phone to silent or deliver only emergency notifications. It could also tell you when you need to take a break
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Epps’s team has made a device which straps to a baseball cap that can work out the intensity of a task and when a person switches to another task – just from their head movements.
  • o use the data from wearables to train artificial intelligences.
  • Epps’s team is building a new prototype made from cheap components that can be worn on glasses, which tracks eye movement and speech as well as head motion.
  •  
    A wearable system that tracks head movements could help people to multitask and handle distractions. The data generated by wearables on millions of humans can be useful for learning purposes of robots and AI. 
Maria Gurova

Rentals Delivered By Drone Could Make Ownership Obsolete | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • Today, the most convenient way to have access to something you want is to own it and keep it where you live. That's because the process of having something delivered is too costly, cumbersome, and slow to do every time you need it.
  • Still, people don't want things soon. They want them NOW. A 30-minute Amazon Prime Air is the closest approximation of “now” we've seen yet.
  • Yet the greatest impact of robotic delivery might not be owning things quicker, but rather not having to own them in the first place. That's because once you can have something approximately now, the functional difference between ownership and rental disappears
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Maybe we'll 3D print what we currently buy. And there will always be things too big to be conveniently shlepped around. But eventually, I'd bet it won't be humans delivering the pizzas, tools, electronics, clothes, and many other things we buy or borrow today.
  • We might buy less stuff and all objects would spend more of their existence being used rather than in a closet, so we wouldn't have to manufacture as many copies of things
  • Perhaps most exciting of all is what the transition from owning to sharing could mean for our psyches
Maria Gurova

Driverless cars, pilotless planes … will there be jobs left for a human being... - 3 views

  • From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.
  • One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money.
  • The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The invention of 3D printing, in which every home or office will be equipped with an in-house printer that can spew out the goods we want – from shoes to pills – anticipates a world of what Summers calls automated "doers". They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work.
  • we have come to the end of the great "general purpose technologies" (technologies that transform an entire economy, such as the steam engine, electricity, the car and so on) that changed the world. There are no new transformative technologies to carry us forward, while the old activities are being robotised and automated.
  • Notwithstanding robotisation and automation, I identify four broad areas in which there will be vast job opportunities.The first is in micro-production
  • The second is in human wellbeing. There will be vast growth in advising, coaching, caring, mentoring, doctoring, nursing, teaching and generally enhancing capabilities.
  • The third is in addressing the globe's "wicked issues" . There will be new forms of nutrition and carbon-efficient energy, along with economising with water, to meet the demands of a world population of 9 billion in 2050.
  • And fourthly, digital and big data management will foster whole new industries
  • the truth is, nobody knows. What we do know is that two-thirds of what we consume today was not invented 25 years ago. It will be the same again in a generation's time
  •  
    demand for the new expertise may impact not only the school and academic education, but earlier development stages
Maria Gurova

The Four Things People Can Still Do Better Than Computers | Fast Company | Business + I... - 1 views

  • computers' strengths lie in speed and accuracy, while humans' strengths are all about flexibility
  • There are three types of work that humans do really well but computers cannot (yet):
  • 1) Unstructured problem-solving
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 2) Acquiring and processing new information, deciding what is relevant in a flood of undefined phenomena
  • reinvent our education system to prepare children for an "increased emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem-solving"--and to better collaborate with, take care of, and program the computers that are going to continue to be our sidekicks
  • 4) Being human
al_semenchenko

Artificially Intelligent Lawyer "Ross" Has Been Hired By Its First Official Law Firm - 0 views

  • Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing IBM’s AI Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which at the moment consists of nearly 50 lawyers.
  • Ross, “the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney” built on IBM’s cognitive computer Watson, was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. Ross also learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more you interact with it.
  • “At BakerHostetler, we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients.”
evgeny lavrov

2050 Demographics Projections | Prediction | Future | Technology | Timeline | Trend | 2... - 0 views

  • the average desktop computer now has the raw processing power equivalent to all of the human brains on Earth combined
  • There is no longer a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence
  • Full immersion VR is now a mainstream phenomenon
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Entire new societies have formed in cyberspace
  • By the mid-2050s, traditional Western news corporations no longer exist
  • News gathering, analysis and distribution has fragmented - shifting to millions of creative individuals, bloggers, citizen journalists and small-scale enterprises.
  • Traditional Western TV channels have largely disappeared
  • replaced by unique "personalised" web channels, covering practically any subject or combination of subjects imaginable
  • Debates are now occurring over "synthetic people" entering the population.
al_semenchenko

The NSA's SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people | Ars Technica UK - 1 views

  • In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata."
  • According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.
  •  A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.
  • Algorithms increasingly rule our lives. It's a small step from applying SKYNET logic to look for "terrorists" in Pakistan to applying the same logic domestically to look for "drug dealers" or "protesters" or just people who disagree with the state.
  •  
    Modern technology already relies heavily on AI. AI decides who to kill based on metadata.
Maria Gurova

Google: The new GE: Google, everywhere | The Economist - 0 views

  • Its latest purchase is Nest Labs, a maker of sophisticated thermostats and smoke detectors: on January 13th Google said it would pay $3.2 billion in cash for the firm. Google’s biggest move into hardware so far is its $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility
  • With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor is data: gathering and crunching them, to make physical devices more intelligent.
  • Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This month Samsung announced a new smart-home computing platform that will let people control washing machines, televisions and other devices it makes from a single app. Microsoft, Apple and Amazon were also tipped to take a lead there, but Google was until now seen as something of a laggard.
  • it is likely to do what it did with driverless cars: take a technology financed by military contracts and adapt it for the consumer market.
1 - 19 of 19
Showing 20 items per page