The Rise of the Robots — Friend or Foe?

Robots – Friends or Foe

Advancement in technology would mean that robots tend to look and behave like humans and also seem to behave like their human counterparts. Financial Times’ Richard Waters and Kana Inagaki have learned the latest humanoid robots and debate whether these machines could really bring about a change in the society. FT has put forth this question whether robots could be Friend or Foe in their very 21st century YouTube series `Living with Robots', all about man and machine.

Japan seems to have a thing for robots right from aiding the elderly in Japan to humanoid robots being created and the series going ahead in the role of these man-made machines, in our home to our workplace and to the world that surround us.

The series, ‘Man or Machine? Building Robots Like Us takes us to Japan wherein the researcher are making use of the prevailing technological advances by creating robots which look like humans. In the documentary – Man or Machine, Building Robots Like Us, there are two examples and Japanese one tends to focus on creating robots with faces and bodies like human beings. They are android and Kana Inagaki of Financial Times speaks to one of them, Matsukoroid, a popular late-night TV host.

Technology – Interesting Less Machine-Like

Chief executive of A-Lab, co-creator of Matsukoroid, Takeshi Mita had commented that people would find it creepy or scary on seeing an android at first sight, However, human seem to be malleable and hence they can accept the presence of androids with passage of time an occurrence which does not tend to happen with other robots. The Japanese method is to make the technology very interesting to the common people as well as less machine-like.

Senior Manager of Toshiba, Hideo Aruga, state that there are people who are not good with machines such as the elderly, people with disabilities as well as children and for them it is essential to have android who can transmit information for them. The Japanese tend to see android robot as the solution to the altering demographics in their nation and with the biggest rate of elderly on the earth together with a decline in birth-rate, it envisages androids as an appropriate replacement for less human workers. Androids can look after the elderly, work in childcare and can help the disabled. The designer is of the belief that the public feels the link due to the characteristic of human in these machines.

Interesting Prospective, Not Shared by Robotic Researchers

Richard Waters of Financial Times state that it seems to be an interesting perspective which is not shared by robotic researchers in the United States. He goes on to describe that the approach of North America’s Silicon Valley is aimed on emerging technology which is definitely not human but focused on learning to expect what we humans need to do. Robot that has also contested in DARPA’s robotic challenge should not be mistaken for human inspite of being most bipedal and in possession of two upper limbs.

Silvio Savarese, assistant professor at Stanford University has described the kind of androids that are developed in Japan as robots which according to him could create fear in people and debates that robot need to be practical and cute and not anthropomorphic. He together with his colleagues are the creators of the Jackrabbot in the Computational Vision and Geometry Lab at Stanford, which is a self-navigating automated electric delivery cart which tends to operate in the attendance of human without colliding in them.