"Robot" Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot
15 points by icefox
15 points by icefox
An interesting article, but nowhere is the word "appliance" used. I feel like a lot of grey area can be covered by simply invoking that concept. Maybe the boundaries around appliances are fuzzy too, but common household appliances that have existed for over 50 years now can avoid the argument.
This was addressed in the article this was a response to:
So take a look at what we still call robots: they’re strange new worlds of technology, early in their journeys within our societies. Roombas are mid-journey: familiar and approachable enough that they’ve begun to be anthropomorphized with names, attributed personalities, and even microfic. Dishwashers have completed their journey to ubiquity as appliances.
So I take it that this author is quibbling about the precise definition of "robot" but not the general sentiment that ubuiquity transforms robots into appliances. See how they acknowledge this transition:
When I attended the RoboBusiness conference circa 2007, I remember the conference information specifically stating it was NOT for industrial robotic arms because they didn’t consider those robots anymore. Meanwhile, Roombas were state of the art and everyone was excited about wheeled mobile robots. A decade later, industrial robotic arms were allowed back in because power- and force-limited cobots and advanced vision systems attached to robot arms opened up novel new applications and capabilities that people had only just started to contemplate being automatable.
Mnyeh. Isaac Asimov, who invented the term robotics, wrote that a robot is a mobile computerized tool that resembles a human.
At one point, Asimov hypothesized that the cost of a general purpose computer (what he meant was borderline AGI) would be high, so it makes more sense to own one which can operate all the tools that a human can use, rather than putting computers and motors into brooms, vacuums, automobiles, stoves, dishwashers, HVAC systems, bulldozers, and so forth.
He failed to see that not-even-vaguely-AGI computers would be extremely cheap, and it is much easier to automate an extremely limited domain (dishwasher) than to employ a robot to wash your dishes, drive your car and mow your lawn.
Nevertheless: if it's not human-sized and human-shaped, it's not a robot. It could be a Giant Robot, it could be a robotic vacuum-cleaner, it could be a home automation system with a voice interface running on an old laptop, but these things are not robots.
A robot is a general purpose, mobile, computerized tool that resembles a human and can do many things autonomously. Anything else requires qualification. Fictionally, C3PO is a robot, R2D2 is a little-person-in-a-wheelchair robot, and HAL9000 is not a robot. Skynet is not a robot, the Terminators are.
incidentally, every dish-cleaning function in a modern dishwasher can be handled by purely mechanical systems that do not need to be Turing complete.
I enjoyed this!
Doubleplusgood, this is something that's disturbed me for ages.
And of course the modern dishwasher was invented by Josephine Cochrane.