Who on earth wants robots in their home?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Bill Gates declares that we’re on the verge of the robot revolution. The robotics industry is at the same place now that the personal computer industry was in the late 70’s, and soon reasonably priced home robots will be on the market. Who would want such a thing?

First, two facts that Gates agrees with in his article. First, it will take massively complicated software to make robots function correctly. Industrial robots generally perform repetitive tasks endlessly, and there are supervisors in the factory to watch for defects. Home robots, on the other hand, would exist to replace basic home tasks. They might prepare food, vacuum carpets, do the laundry, take care of sick or disabled people, and so forth, and they’d do so without supervision. Hence the need for very advanced artificial intelligence.

Second, home robots will be connected to the internet. They’ll need to download updates and patches from the manufacturer. Further, some robots will need outside information to complete their tasks. For instance, a gardening robot would need a weather forecast before deciding whether or not to water the lawn. Also, people might want to check on how their robots are doing while they’re away from the house.

Now we all know that computer security is imperfect. More than a decade after the internet went big time, we still struggle with viruses, hackers, and spam, and there’s no end in sight. The potential for damage is limited, however. Spammers can only steal our financial information if we make a mistake and give it to them, and viruses can at worst mess with our files. Beyond that, spam just makes unwanted stuff appear on our screen, and we can handle that with the delete key.

With robots there’s far more potential for abuse. Imagine that your Cookomatic 3001 refuses to serve dinner until you buy some penis enlargement pills. Or your Auto-Laundro leaves a message from a Nigerian prince who wants to share his fortune on your brand new shirt. It’s a nightmare scenario.

Further, it’s a security risk. You can control what you type into your computer, thus limiting how much information is made available. A robot, once controlled by a malicious outsider, could access anything in your house. It could search through filing cabinets and find your bank account number and password. It could monitor everything you do and use the results for blackmail.

What I see here is a bad science fiction novel waiting to happen.

2

And I see a clean floor in half the time. :smiley:

First of all, there’s no REASON a robot has to be hooked up to the internet all the time. The Roomba is essentially a fairly simple robot vacuum cleaner, and it’s stand-alone. My Crock-pot can turn itself on to cook my meal while the breadmaker times itself to have bread done at the same time and my Aerogarden has automatic gardening cycles growing mesclun mix for my salad on the same countertop - those are “robotic food manufacturers” of a type. Would it be nice to link it to my PDA so if I’m going to be late it’ll adjust its start time? Sure, but one could rig it with a phone line and PIN.

A gardening robot, instead of hooking up to read AccuWeather.com, could be equipped with its own temperature and humidity sensors and forecasting algorithms.

The more features and more generalized things become, the more intervention needed, sure. And people *will *trade a whole lot of security for more convenience. But if things are designed with security in mind, there’s no reason they have to.

3

One of the reasons Japan is so big on robots is geriatric care. They’ve got an aging population, and not enough people to take care of them in the next few decades. From what I gather, Honda’s walking robots et. al. are part of a solution to that.

As for malicious intent… the governments of the world are fairly lacadasical right now when it comes to punishing internet crime. You can steal hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers, take over as many desktop PCs and use them to flood a website or send spam email, etc. etc., and there’s not a lot that is done by authorities to find and penalize you. If the consequences were a bit more dire, I’m sure more would be done. A few high-profile, long-jailterm arrests, and the criminals will realize there’s finally consequences to their actions.

4

Will it bring me a beer without me having to discuss our relationship?

Then I’m all for it. Hell, I’ll take six. If they become self-aware and turn on me before launching a first strike, well, at least I had a beer.

5

wait a minute–are we talking about real robots, like on the Jetsons?
Or are we talking about a little one-purpose machines? (such as a self-propelled vacuum cleaner on wheels with a little radar device to keep it from bumping into the furniture)

real robots would need real intelligence. And every time some geek claims that they’re making great advances in artificial intelligence, I respond with the same retort: “so how come they can’t make a decent spam filter email?”
There’s no way we will see real, intelligent robots soon. I define intelligent as being able to see a baby crawl towards a hot stove and reach out to stop him.

6

Properly made, regardless of whether they connect to the internet or not, you’re at no risk of having your robot be hacked. Computers are at risk because they have to be capable of multiple tasks, and to deal with an endless supply of different scenarios. A robot will only have a single IP address to which it will connect, and from which it will accept connections. And any data between those two can be sent encrypted, based on a private key held at the corporation so no one can spoof it.

Of course, they’ll end up doing stuff that can get your robot hacked just because some gimick functionality made them decide to toss security to the wind. But…people will buy it so…

7

We’ve already got machines doing a ton of our work, but a humanoid Jetsons-type robot isn’t practical.

If we think of all the things we do now by machines as compared to 100 years ago, a short list includes: washing dishes, copying documents, washing clothes, cleaning rugs, accounting functions, financial transactions and lawn care. Some of these things we can even arrange to be done without personal human intervention, at least in part. Many of the parts that remain for humans to do are things we need to use our brains for, not our bodies. For example, we can use a machine to do the hard work of clothes-washing, but a human has to decide not to put the jeans in the machine with the silks. Or to separate the whites and the dark colors. We can program a system to pay our bills on a pre-set basis, but the human needs to decide which of two bills is more important to pay first.

8

Robots for vacuum cleaning are already on the market, as are those for mowing the lawn and other such basics. At the moment they’re prohibitively expensive for a middle-class household, but they may soon change. Gates insists that we’ll soon see more complex multi-tasking robots, such as one that can do all necessary tasks for a disabled or elderly person. I figure that if such a robot exists, it must have unlimited freedom of movement and decision-making power.

9

I’m still giggling about the idea of an anthropomorphic robot running on Windows. When the live-action movie version of The Jetsons goes into production, and it wil certainly go into production, the screenwriters will be well-advised to read this article.

10

Problems with Windows running a home robot:

“Mom! The robot crashed again!”

“Well, just reboot it like we taught you!”

“No, I mean it really crashed! Right through the screen door and now it’s outside in the yard going in circles! I can hear sirens!”

11

Done and done. The last should simply be a matter of setting up a one-time initial priority list for payments, though if you’re short on cash to the point of having to delay payment on bills, some human intervention an decision-making in that area is probably overdue.

12

People by the millions enter every stinking little bit of their financial information into their computer, through banking and tax software and online commerce. Why would you think a potentially hackable robot would be more of a risk than that? At least you can put your financial paperwork in a physically locked cabinet.

The thing that people tend to forget is that manipulating information is far easier than manipulating physical objects. Our ability to move information around grows by leaps and bounds, but we still don’t have a flying car or personal jetpack. Honda’s Asimo robot, which moves on a pre-programmed path can barely jog and negotiate stairs without falling down, and even that is amazing.

I’d give it at least 20 years until you get a humanoid robot skillful enough to let roam your house freely, while having an expensive crystal vase on your dining room table.

13

That second paragraph is my opinion as well. Most computer security issues go unresolved not because good software in unavailable, but rather because of human frailty. Robot security issues would pop up for the same reason. Companies would rush unsecure robots to market without proper testing, or owners wouldn’t install necessary security precautions, or people would buy the cheapo robot rather than the safer but more expensive version.

As soon as Gates talked about a cooking robot, I immediately imagined the Microsoft Cookomatic dumping a pile of raw hamburger on the table and declaring that the cooking is “Done”.

14

Roombas actually aren’t that bad. Woot.com has them regularly and they are often under $200.

15

Huh? A Roomba or Scooba is hardly “prohibitively expensive” for almost any middle-class household. Hell, most families I know have spent more than that on the largest of their several televisions, not to mention Gameboys, Xboxes, etc…

The lawn mowing robots are pretty pricey.

And as to the internet aspect… what makes you so sure that they won’t just send you a CD or DVD with the software upgrades, and/or do good testing beforehand so that patching isn’t as necessary as with commercial software.

My (soon-to-be) sister-in-law’s minivan has built-in navigation assistance, and to upgrade the maps, you have to buy new DVDs from Chrysler for several hundred bucks. I don’t see why a commercial home robot would be any different.

16

It occurs to me that we don’t need hugely powerful AI to do this. We need cheap and effective telepresence. If we can manufacture a small, usefull and versatile human form factor robot you could hire somebody in the third world to operate it remotely to do a very wide range of tasks. If I was a betting man this is where I’d put my money. You’d have a monthly for robot rental and service agreement, the robot would be ‘manned’ so many hours a day and would do whatever tasks you need. This would have several advantages, you get the benefit of a low wage worker but who’s labor is enjoyed in a wealthy nation with expensive labor. You’d have fewer real security concerns over an actual person in your home, how exactly is that telepresence worker going to steal from you from an ocean away with a robot that can’t leave your home? Governments would love it because they’d get around those pesky immigration issues, robots don’t need social services and don’t vote. I don’t think we’re very far away from being able to do this.

17

"You have been deemed hazardous. Termination authorised. "

18

The Roomba does not suck, so it is not a vacuum cleaner. The Roomba is a crude guidance system attached to a Hoky manual sweeper. It’s something you use in between vacuuming, to pick up the crumbs and leaves. It’s the equivalent of picking up the cigarette butts to make it look as though you cleaned the lobby.

I don’t know the exact technical definition of robot, but I feel pretty sure that my time-triggered coffeemaker and my programmed furnace thermostat don’t qualify.

The gee-whiz pieces in Popular Science always talked about calling home to say “I won’t be home on time, so don’t start the roast until two hours later.” It’s nice to think about Wallace and Gromit having machines dump them out of bed into their clothes* and having breakfast ready, but if you want to call home to change the timing, somebody can hack in to disable the security system. Somebody can steal your cheese or your Wrong Trousers before you get home. :eek:

*Gromit wears his clothes all the time. He’s ready for anything.

19

The Roomba has a sweeper for the large stuff and a vacuum for the find dust. It actually does a pretty good job. The Roomba batteries, though, really do suck.

20

The difference between home PC’s and home robots is that thousands of people don’t die when there is a PC virus outbreak.