Are The Robots Coming?

French President Francois Hollande cradles a baby robot. Photo credit unknown.

This photo is making the rounds of Facebook and G+ and is supposed to illustrate how the Socialist president is going to re-animate French industry by producing robots and driverless cars and such. Okay, hope that works out!

Meanwhile, the Germans are also working intensively on robots as well, as we can see from JAMES, whose name is spelled from Joint Action in Multimodal Embodied Systems.

Here he looks like Garfield the cat's shrunken head put on some kind of Toy Story muscle airmen or something:

Here he looks a little more upbeat. Then in this news story he has an improved look more like a winking British butler.

But I don't think he's in danger of replacing humans just yet because he's terribly slow and doesn't really keep up with the small talk.

You realize in these choppy robot motions just how hard it is to get robots working and doing things and have them cope in an environment with multiple people talking at them etc.

Second Life is filled with artificial intelligence experiments and I have some of them myself. I have both the brains in a jar and the parrot that is based on ALICE or some offshoot of one of those types of artificial brain languages, and you can ask it questions and it gives funny answers. I ask if it is knows where the central asset server is, and half the time the parrot, who I have dubbed "CEO of the Metaverse," says he lost it. You ask these AIs if they will kill humans, and they aren't sure. They answer with your own question back at you in some cases.

Every time I log in on the Iris server where I have the Moth Temple build and tutorials, I find a whole bunch of bots clogging up the infohub. I have to try to get the server reset to shake them loose, or try to figure out who their bot-handlers are and get them to come wrangle them, as they just bob around like idiots. Some newbies wind up talking to them and not realizing they aren't real.

Some of them are club bots or mall bots that say Welcome to X and tell you about their establishments, some are sex bots. Some are just weird role-play bots that are dressed up as cowboys or Goreans.

Here's how you tell the bots from the real people. Wade into the midst and say, "Anybody want to earn $100 for a survey?" The real people obviously want to and answer, the bots don't care.

There are bots set up to go around to the money trees in Second Life, which people put out to attract visitors to their malls and clubs and give them a little "start-up" money. I have one of these in my mall in Ross. I find there is almost no correlation between the people who shake the money tree and the people who buy products or rent. But if you don't put a money tree in your SL mall you don't have that "lived-in look".

Some people have designed bots that search the Search Places list or classifieds for ads that show the phrase "money tree," land by them, pluck them, wait their intervals, pluck some more, etc. So the money-tree coder now have a way of defeating this which is clever, ask me and I'll tell you unless you are a bot-wrangler.

I think we're aways away from having robots -- as distinct from automation, computerization, etc. -- take over for humans in the service industry. I can't imagine that the cost of manufacturing, deploying, and managing bots in hospitals will really ever be justified by contrast to minimum-wage humans or even double-minimum wage humans who are currently deployed in hospitals now as the first line of defense monitoring the machines in intensive care, for example. These people sit for 8 hours a stretch consciously writing down everything the patient does every 10 or 15 minutes, but they literally have nothing to do except maybe straighten a pillow or go over and sometimes press reset on the machine when it goes offline. The serious stuff like ventilation and IVs are run by machines with alarms that bring more costly professionals running to do various things.

There are now machines that do things like lift patients' legs or arms to keep them from getting bed sores or to try to begin exercising them so they don't get weak, but I've never seen a machine that manages bed pans, and I suppose that's how we can be sure there will be humans with us when we are born and when we die (if in a hospital) probably for some time to come.

Robots tend to bore me. I know Will Wright is fascinated with them. To me, they seem like SO much work and they are so limited socially -- they really have no soul...