{"id":8957,"date":"2006-05-24T21:29:23","date_gmt":"2006-05-24T21:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streettech.dreamhosters.com\/?p=8957"},"modified":"2006-05-24T21:29:23","modified_gmt":"2006-05-24T21:29:23","slug":"he-was-no-robot-he-was-my-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/?p=8957","title":{"rendered":"He Was No Robot, He Was My Friend!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reuters had a rather disheveled piece<\/a> yesterday about military robots in Iraq and how soldiers were getting attached to them, even grieving over their loss. That’s not the mixed up part. That’s completely understandable (more mundane example: I SWEAR my Roomba has an unhealthly interest in the umbrella stand by the front door and snubs his bump sensors at me as I yell: “Hey, stay away from there!” and “Get the rug out of your mouth”). The strange bit is how they used the robot casualties in Iraq angle to segue into talking about Rodney Brooks\/iRobot’s ideas on robot avatars. This is Brooks’ answer to being able to get highly intelligent robots into our lives before reliable artificial intelligence is ready for prime time. So, what’s a robot avatar? Well, remote-controlled robots, such as the military PackBots, could qualify. But Brooks’ idea is a bit more expansive than R\/C. After the jump is a piece of “micro-fiction” I wrote for my book Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots<\/a>. Written for the intro to the “Robot Evolution” chapter, it explains one possible senario using Brooks’ concept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t Call Me Chief! <\/p>\n

The year is 2010. You’re in your home office working feverishly on your latest book and you’re in dire need of reinforcements from major snacks. “Dexter, can you come here?” you shout. From the living room, you hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner powering down and the increasingly loud whine of servo motors as your Sony Roboman 3000 lumbers in. “Can you get me a diet soda, the guacamole from the fridge, and that big bag of corn chips from the kitchen counter?” you ask. “Hey, not a prob, Chief,” your bot responds, in distressingly casual English. You sigh. “I thought I told you not to call me ‘Chief’,” you scold, as Dexter heads for the kitchen. You make a mental note to complain to the service company about the slacker attitude of today’s brain. Dexter brings back your snacks, along with the day’s hard mail. “Well, that’s the end of my shift, Chief. Call me history,” he announces, after he sees that you’re happily munching away. Without waiting for a reply, he walks over to the recharging station and snaps himself in. The activity lights on his chest and head slowly wink out as your R3000 goes into “stand-by” mode. <\/p>\n

Across the country, in a nondescript California office building that once housed an endless parade of dot-bombs, your “brain” peels off his VR headset and steps out of his motion capture suit. “What a load, that guy!,” he snorts, fluffing up his multicolored dreadlocks. “A writer? Pah! And I thought my gig offered poor job security.” He hops onto his gyro-scooter and buzzes down a hallway lined with cubicles of other people in VR suits, hired to inhabit the world’s robots, to serve as the higher intelligence that, so far, frustratingly eludes the world’s machines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}