Sure, it can backflip – but can a robot hold down a desk job?

Robots can do incredible things, but as Amy LaViers points out, humans can do things that we do not yet understand – that we do not yet even value. A colleague of mine, a roboticist, recently proclaimed that if one could teleoperate the robot he developed in his lab, it could hold down a desk job. It’s a common sentiment among roboticists that existing mechanical hardware is sufficient to replace humans in many of the tasks by which we earn a living. Rather than the hardware, the last, golden step to having human-like machine counterparts is in the development of appropriate algorithms. But this is wrong. There is in fact little evidence that robots have the mechanical features necessary to hold down a desk job, regardless of the algorithms. Roboticists such as my colleague love algorithms. Many of them grew up playing video games where the challenge was thinking through the correct set of actions, out of a predefined set of options, corresponding to little, discrete buttons on a gamepad, in a virtual world. To beat a video game is to find the right sequence of actions. What many roboticists don’t realise is how incredible, and incredibly complex, their own movement… Read full this story

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