http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming"For many years the problem with robots has been that computers are very good at things we find difficult but very bad at things we find easy. They are brilliant at chess but terrible at the cognitive skills we take for granted, one of the most important being something scientists call SLAM, for ‘simultaneous localisation and mapping’: the ability to look at a space and see it and know how to move through it, all simultaneously, and with good recall. That, and other skills essential to advanced robotics, is something computers are useless at. A robot chess player can thrash the best chess player in the world, but can’t (or couldn’t) match the motor and perceptual skills of a one-year-old baby. A famous demonstration of the principle came in 2006, when scientists at Honda staged a public unveiling of their amazing new healthcare robot, the Asimo. Asimo is short (4’3”) and white with a black facemask and a metal backpack. It resembles an unusually small astronaut. In the video Asimo advances towards a staircase and starts climbing while turning his face towards the audience as if to say, à la Bender from Futurama, ‘check out my shiny metal ass’. He goes up two steps and then falls over. Tittering ensues. It is evident that a new day in robotics has not yet dawned.
That, though, was nine years ago, and Moore’s law and machine learning have been at work. The new generation of robots are not ridiculous. Take a look online at the latest generation of Kiva robots employed by Amazon in the ‘fulfilment centres’ where it makes up and dispatches its parcels. (Though pause first to enjoy the full resonance of ‘fulfilment centres’.) The robots are low, slow, accessorised in a friendly orange. They can lift three thousand pounds at a time and carry an entire stack of shelves in one go. Directed wirelessly along preprogrammed paths, they swivel and dance around each other with surprising elegance, then pick up their packages according to the instructions printed on automatically scanned barcodes. They are not alarming, but they are inexorable, and they aren’t going away: the labour being done by these robots is work that will never again be done by people. It looks like the future predicted by Wassily Leontief, a Nobel laureate in economics, who said in 1983 that ‘the role of h
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