HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/anarchy/essays/term/wiredhnd.txt

Text File | 1996-04-27 | 7KB | 139 lines

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WIRED HANDS - A Brief Look at Robotics                   NEWSCIENCE
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Two years ago, the Chrysler corporation completely gutted its
Windsor, Ontario, car assembly plant and within six weeks had
installed an entirely new factory inside the building.  It was a
marvel of engineering.  When it came time to go to work, a whole
new work force marched onto the assembly line.  There on
opening day was a crew of 150 industrial robots.

Industrial robots don't look anything like the androids from
sci-fi books and movies.  They don't act like the evil Daleks or a
fusspot C-3P0.  If anything, the industrial robots toiling on the
Chrysler line resemble elegant swans or baby brontosauruses
with their fat, squat bodies, long arched necks and small heads.
An industrial robot is essentially a long manipulator arm that
holds tools such as welding guns or motorized screwdrivers or
grippers for picking up objects.

The robots working at Chrysler and in numerous other modern
factories are extremely adept at performing highly specialized
tasks - one robot may spray paint car parts while another does
spots welds while another pours radioactive chemicals.  Robots
are ideal workers: they never get bored and they work around the
clock.  What's even more important, they're flexible.  By altering
its programming you can instruct a robot to take on different
tasks. This is largely what sets robots apart from other
machines; try as you might you can't make your washing machine
do the dishes.  Although some critics complain that robots are
stealing much-needed jobs away from people, so far they've been
given only the dreariest, dirtiest, most soul-destroying work.

The word robot is Slav in origin and is related to the words for
work and worker.  Robots first appeared in a play, Rossum's
Universal Robots, written in 1920 by the Czech playwright, Karel
Capek.  The play tells of an engineer who designs man-like
machines that have no human weakness and become immensely
popular.  However, when the robots are used for war they rebel
against their human masters.

Though industrial robots do dull, dehumanizing work, they are
nevertheless a delight to watch as they crane their long necks,
swivel their heads and poke about the area where they work.
They satisfy "that vague longing to see the human body reflected
in a machine, to see a living function translated into mechanical
parts", as one writer has said.

Just as much fun are the numerous "personal" robots now on the
market, the most popular of which is HERO, manufactured by
Heathkit.  Looking like a plastic step-stool on wheels, HERO can
lift objects with its one clawed arm and utter
computer-synthesized speech.  There's Hubot, too, which comes
with a television screen face, flashing lights and a computer
keyboard that pulls out from its stomach.  Hubot moves at a pace
of 30 cm per second and can function as a burglar alarm and a
wake up service.  Several years ago, the swank department store
Neiman-Marcus sold a robot pet, named Wires.

When you boil all the feathers out of the hype, HERO, Hubot, Wires
et. al. are really just super toys.  You may dream of living like a
slothful sultan surrounded by a coterie of metal maids, but any
further automation in your home will instead include things like
lights that switch on automatically when the natural light dims
or carpets with permanent suction systems built into them.

One of the earliest attempts at a robot design was a machine,
nicknamed Shakey by its inventor because it was so wobbly on
its feet.  Today, poor Shakey is a rusting pile of metal sitting in
the corner of a California laboratory.  Robot engineers have since
realized that the greater challenge is not in putting together the
nuts and bolts, but rather in devising the lists of instructions -
the "software - that tell robots what to do".

Software has indeed become increasingly sophisticated year by
year.  The Canadian weather service now employs a program
called METEO which translates weather reports from English to
French.  There are computer programs that diagnose medical
ailments and locate valuable ore deposits.  Still other computer
programs play and win at chess, checkers and go.

As a results, robots are undoubtedly getting "smarter".  The
Diffracto company in Windsor is one of the world's leading
designers and makers of machine vision.  A robot outfitted with
Diffracto "eyes" can find a part, distinguish it from another part
and even examine it for flaws.  Diffracto is now working on a
tomato sorter which examines colour, looking for no-red - i.e.
unripe - tomatoes as they roll past its TV camera eye.  When an
unripe tomato is spotted, a computer directs a robot arm to pick
out the pale fruit.

Another Diffracto system helps the space shuttle's Canadarm
pick up satellites from space.  This sensor looks for reflections
on a satellites gleaming surface and can determine the position
and speed of the satellite as it whirls through the sky.  It tells
the astronaut when the satellite is in the right position to be
snatched up by the space arm.

The biggest challenge in robotics today is making software that
can help robots find their way around a complex and chaotic
world.  Seemingly sophisticated tasks such as robots do in the
factories can often be relatively easy to program, while the
ordinary, everyday things people do - walking, reading a letter,
planning a trip to the grocery store - turn out to be incredibly
difficult.  The day has still to come when a computer program
can do anything more than a highly specialized and very orderly
task.

The trouble with having a robot in the house for example, is that
life there is so unpredictable, as it is everywhere else outside
the assembly line.  In a house, chairs get moved around, there is
invariably some clutter on the floor, kids and pets are always
running around.  Robots work efficiently on the assembly line
where there is no variation, but they are not good at
improvisation.  Robots are disco, not jazz.  The irony in having a
robot housekeeper is that you would have to keep your house
perfectly tidy with every item in the same place all the time so
that your metal maid could get around.

Many of the computer scientists who are attempting to make
robots brighter are said to working in the field of Artificial
Intelligence, or AI.  These researchers face a huge dilemma
because there is no real consensus as to what intelligence is.
Many in AI hold the view that the human mind works according to
a set of formal rules.  They believe that the mind is a clockwork
mechanism and that human judgement is simply calculation.
Once these formal rules of thought can be discovered, they will
simply be applied to machines.

On the other hand, there are those critics of AI who contend that
thought  is intuition, insight, inspiration.  Human consciousness
is a stream in which ideas bubble up from the bottom or jump
into the air like fish.

This debate over intelligence and mind is, of course, one that has
gone on for thousands of years.  Perhaps the outcome of the
"robolution" will be to make us that much wiser.