Download in my own words The Future Comes on Two Robotic Feet

in my own words
The Future Comes on Two Robotic Feet
Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D.
You might think from his books How to Survive a Robot Uprising,
Robopocalypse, and Robogenesis that Daniel Wilson sees robots as
malevolent creatures. But when he talks about robots, Wilson, who
earned his Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, is
relentlessly optimistic about their ability to solve important problems.
He is the author of nine books, several short stories, and two comic
books, as well as the developer of Mayday! Deep Space, a playable story
app. Yet, as he explains here, his mind is never far from the robotics lab.
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The brain of a robot
The first time I really saw what a robot could do was at the
University of Tulsa, when I was working on my computer science degree. I was learning about something called genetic
algorithms, in which a computer solves problems based on
processes that mimic natural selection. This wasn’t an actual
robot—it was artificial intelligence—but I saw immediately
that this was the brain of a robot. That was my first experience
with AI and robotics, and I immediately wanted more.
Turning robots inside out
I wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon because they have a
huge robotics institute with every type of robot you can think
of. When I got there, I was just in this wonderland of robots.
There were humanoid robots and space robots and medical
robots that basically walk around inside your body. I ended
up working with Dr. Chris Atkeson, who half the time studies
intelligent environments, and the other half, humanoid robots.
If you walk into his lab on any given day, you might see a pair
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of disembodied robotic legs or $100,000 worth of cameras
piled up. Baymax from Big Hero 6 was actually based on
Chris’s research.
I was really interested in artificial intelligence, machine
learning. I built robots that were turned inside out: Instead
of a platform with sensors and everything mounted on the
robot to help it wander through the environment, I spread
sensors throughout the environment so it could respond
as humans wandered through it. These are called smart
houses—or intelligent environments, ubiquitous computing, or a lot of other names—but in my mind it was letting
people wander around inside my robot.
To observe and protect
I grew up in Oklahoma. In my family there were a lot of case
managers, nurses who would go out to people’s homes
to check in on them and see what their capabilities were.
There are a lot of people in really, really isolated places.
They don’t interact with other people a lot, and as a result
they can end up in dangerous situations. This is especially
true with elderly people.
Having seen this, I saw an area where I could help. That’s
what I was thinking in the work I did for my dissertation: I
wanted to put sensors into people’s houses. It was all about
activity recognition—figuring out people’s behavior patterns, identifying what’s normal, and trying to spot any kind
of functional decline.
Every robot exists to solve a problem. The question to
start with is, What problem do you care most about?
Technology for good
In the West, we’ve been primed to think of robots as the bad
guys. They were villains in books and movies, and for a long
time they didn’t exist. But now robots are real and people
still think they’re scary. I think they would seem less scary if
people knew more about the people who build robots. The
people who are building the robots aren’t doing it for fun
and they’re not doing it to rule the world. They’re doing it to
solve a real problem; they’re trying to help people.
Welcome to the future
In Robopocalypse, I included all the advances I saw on the
horizon, and many of them are now either here or arriving.
Among the big three are intelligent personal assistants on
your phone, like Siri or Cortana, that use speech recogni-
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even autonomous vehicles that can navigate through an environment without hurting people. Putting those all together
into a single platform is going to be a major endeavor. It’s
going to happen, and I really can’t wait. Won’t it be exciting to
be an early adopter—in a literal sense—when you’re bringing a humanoid robot into your home?
tion to determine what you want. I just got an Amazon Echo.
I tell the Echo to play music and to schedule things and it’s
always there, always listening (which is a little creepy but I
love it).
The second technology I’ve been watching is autonomous vehicles. That’s the robot that I think will make the
most impact on human beings. (In Robopocalypse, of course
all the cars go crazy and kill everyone. I don’t think that’s
going to happen, but you might keep an old car around just
in case.) In the DARPA Grand Challenge for self-driving
cars, none of the cars completed the challenge the first year.
They all failed. The next year all the cars completed the
challenge. Two years later they were merging and parking
and obeying street lights. The leap was incredible.
The third area of robotics I’ve loved watching is humanoid robots. There was just a DARPA challenge for that, too.
The robots were slow and they fell down a lot, which
made for terrific YouTube compilations. But the fact
that we’re seeing them fall down means that they’re out
there mixing it up and pushing their limits. You never see
ASIMO fall down, because ASIMO never has to push its
limits and try something new. I expect the same exponential leap forward with humanoids that we saw with the cars.
And to me, this is the future arriving right on time.
The next big thing
A lot of the advances so far have been single purpose. You
might have a really good speech recognition system, but
it’s not on a platform that can walk competently. Or you’ve
got something that can walk, but it’s not paying attention to
humans or the environment. I think the next big challenge
will be to combine speech, gesture, and emotion recognition with all the mobility stuff in quadrupeds and bipeds and
Building robots … on paper
I still visit labs. All the human beings I was friends with in
my early 20s are now robotics professors or they drive the
Curiosity rover or they’re building autonomous vehicles for
Google or doing something else in the world of robotics.
They’re my friends, so I can call them and ask, “What are you
doing?” And I can still understand most of what they say.
I still go to conferences. I just spoke at the Human Robotics
Interaction Conference here in Portland, only I was there to
talk about the pop culture side of things, which is where my
expertise now lies. In the multiverse there’s a version of Daniel Wilson in a lab building robots. I miss it, and I wish I could
do both things. But it’s hard to complain when I wake up in
the morning and go write Superman for a little while and then
write some Game of Thrones in Space. I’m having a really
great time writing science fiction.
If I could build any robot
I wouldn’t build a human, that’s for sure. There are lots of
humans and we’re really good at making more humans. So
I think I would build a machine that would explore—some
kind of machine that would transport me to the farthest frontiers and go with me there. Maybe it would be some kind of
amorphous nanobot swarm that could congeal around me
into a suit of armor, that would let me launch into the deepest
regions of space. I would just want something that would help
me explore and be a companion while I was doing it.
I think about Auguste Piccard—the guy built bathyspheres that were some of the first submarines, and he also
built some of the first high-altitude balloons. This guy went
as high as he could go and as deep as he could go and was
always looking for a frontier. At the heart of it, I think that’s
what robots are meant to do. n
Learn more about Daniel Wilson and his work at www.danielhwilson.com.
www.cty.jhu.edu/imagine
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