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Transcript
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. . 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 6imagine 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- Sept/Oct 2015 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 imagine 7