The movies have brainwashed us into thinking that robots should look like people, but the revolution isn’t turning out that way. How are the machines changing, and how will they change us? DISCOVER, with the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University, posed these questions to four experts in a panel discussion and in video interviews with each scientist individually. Below are the video interviews and the transcript of the panel discussion.
Robin Murphy of Texas A&M is an expert in rescue robots; Red Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon designs robots that work in difficult environments; Javier Movellan of U.C. San Diego studies how robots interact with children; and Rodney Brooks of MIT founded iRobot, maker of the Roomba. Editor in chief Corey S. Powell moderated the panel.
Powell: Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a robot?
Brooks: A robot is something that senses the world, does some sort of computation, and decides to take an action outside of its physical extremity. That action might be moving around, or it might be grabbing something and moving it. I say “outside its extremity” because I don’t like to let dishwashers be defined as robots.
Whittaker: I’m a little more liberal about that. I worked with robots that cleaned up the Three Mile Island nuclear accident [from 1984 to 1986]. Those were remote controlled, and one of the knocks against them was that they weren’t real robots. Those machines that are tour guides to the Titanic or our eyes on Mars don’t do a lot of thinking either, but they’re good enough in my book.
