Exactly Are these robots?

How about this?

Surely a silvery humanoid hell bent on destruction as a robot?

Right.

The thing is it's actually really hard to define a robot, much less get robotics is to agree on a universal definition.

That may seem trivial, but it has serious implications as robots become a bigger part of our lives.

So let's take a stab at defining what a robot is.

But a lot of people tend to follow is this sense think act paradigm which is that the machine has to be capable of somehow sensing its environment and then thinking about or planning its next action and then somehow acting on the world.

So consider a drone.

You pilot to pester your neighbors.

Is that a robot?

Well no it doesn't sense its environment or think on its own.

It acts but only because you tell it to but get yourself an autonomous drone.

And suddenly it's a lot more robotic its senses and thinks and acts on its own.

So the key here is intelligence and artificial intelligence agent.

To me is an agent that acts to maximize a person's utility.

So robots have to actually work together with people and use human guidance and human oversight to learn more about you know what people actually want?

What are their values?

What makes them happy?

So they're no longer just the brutes that follow a series of commands like a robot arm on a factory floor.

But how have they changed exactly what you're going to see here is very much work in progress.

But it gives us a little bit of a glimpse into two different definitions of robotics.

Okay, so now the robot is moving and I'm unhappy with it because it's keeping this too far away from the ground from the table.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna push on it a little bit but it just keeps on going back because it's utility says that it should stay far away from the table.

So no matter what I do, well it lets me deformity but it just goes right back to stubbornly doing it the way it thinks is the optimal way to do the task.

So now this is a robot that tries to optimize what I want and tries to figure out what it is that that I want.

And so when I pushed it down, it actually understood that okay, I must have not been doing the task right.

To begin with.

The stubborn robot is a traditional robot and the one that's sensitive to human needs is a new breed.

But why worry so much about semantics here?

Because robot is a loaded word.

So I think robotics definitely has a pr problem.

It can be kind of a double edged sword in some ways because the word robot just generates a lot of attention and fascination and sometimes fear.

So you can use it to get people's attention or to make people pay attention to your product.

I mean it's much sexier to call something a robot than call something a dishwasher at the same time.

Robot is still a dirty word of sorts.

Especially with all this talk of machines stealing jobs and the rise of artificial intelligence could put even more people out of work in the coming decades.

But it's a I aa robot.

No not on its own.

A robot is a physical thing and that gets tricky with something like a robot tax meaning steal a human job, pay a fee heard from people like Bill Gates.

You know, robots should be taxed.

Okay.

Well what is a robot?

You know, are your software products that you have disrupted labor markets with?

Also robots?

Or is a robot something physical.

So I think as we start to discuss the policy implications, we're going to need more definitional work robots come in different kinds and we have to be careful about which kind we mean when we brand something and when we formally define the problem that we're working on so that we can be clear about what it is that we're trying to achieve.

In the end the machines are here to stay so we better get to know them.

Just be careful who you call a robot.

Yeah.