Here's something that falls well within FW's brief. I have for a long time
been extremely sceptical about the dreams of humanoid robots being the next
big breakthrough consumer good. The following article confirms this. If
these ever happen (which I doubt) they're still decades away.
But, having worked in industry for many years and seen the introduction of
much automation I've been expecting a great deal more development of
automation than has seemed to have happened so far.
However, having said that, it's also a fact that the automation of very
simple repetitive tasks continues apace and some quite trivial operations
can have immense consequences, both in manpower and cost terms but also
accidentally. For example, during my lifetime the trivial task of loading
and unloading goods on and off ships and other vehicles has been
transformed by simple standardized freight containers, reducing dockside
manpower at least 100-fold, long distance costs by at least 20-fold but
also meaning that, for example, the whole world's need for toothbrushes is
now efficiently made and delivered from just one town in China.
Fifty years ago when I was building an extension to my house, sand was
delivered by two men in a truck who dumped it on the pavement, and then
spaded it into my territory -- a two-man, two-hour job. Recently, after
moving house and wanting a ton of lawn sand, a truck with one driver came
along, and then used his crane to lift a jolly-bag right over my garden
wall to a place 30ft away where I wanted it -- a five-minute job, if that.
Even if we'll never have androids looking after all of our intimate needs
(most of them anyway!), we haven't seen the last of automation yet. The
following is in today's Independent.
Keith
-----
ELECTRIC DREAMS: IS IT THE END FOR ROBOT DEVELOPMENT?
Michael Fitzpatrick
We were promised a life of leisure thanks to hard-working robots and
fiendishly clever cyborgs. But the android fantasy has largely been
terminated, argues Michael Fitzpatrick
For years technocrats have been touting robots as the next big revolution,
so big that their importance will rival that of car production and that
they will create a utopia, "an Athens without the slaves", as British
agriculture minister Peter Walker put it in 1983. But despite such claims,
the development of mass-produced useful, commercial robots hasn't much
moved beyond the glorified nut tighteners that work at car factories. Some
think it never will.
The two countries that produce most of the world's robots, and dream of
substituting immigration with metal people, Japan and South Korea, have
been particularly gung-ho about this supposedly new lucrative market. A few
years ago, Korean experts predicted a robot for every home by 2010.
Obviously none of this has transpired, yet the robot industry and the
technocracy continue to hype the robotic dawn as something akin to the
second coming. Even Bill Gates believes the industry "is developing in much
the same way that the computer business did 30 years ago". Nothing could be
further from the truth.
After years of grabbing headlines with PR stunts involving walking, talking
humanoids such as Honda's Asimo, Japan has at last conceded that perhaps
what were needed were not more human-like robots, at least not in the next
five years, but robots along the lines of the best-selling low-tech,
robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba. This realisation seems to have dashed cold
water on decades of technical arrogance.
Last year a Japanese government body, the New Energy and Industrial
Technology Development Organisation, announced more funding for the
development of less-glamorous robots and has earmarked 7.6bn yen to get
these more prosaic drones and lifters into our homes. Until now, the
emphasis in Japan was on creating humanoids and billions has been thrown at
developing multitasking human-like robots that offer very few practical
applications, either now or in the near future.
"They should be able to do more," says Joseph Engelberger (pictured above),
the founding force behind industrial robots and considered the father of
the modern robotics industry. "We need multitasking robots that can think
for themselves and do something useful. Working robots have to be something
more than this," he says, referring to the impracticality of most robots,
at least as far as the media's opinion goes.
Now in his 90s, Engelberger sees the attempts to build human-like bots as
something of a red herring and far from desirable. "The Japanese and
Koreans grow up with a vision of robots are 'friends' so like to
anthropomorphise them, which leads them to skirt the practicalities," he
says. "The Japanese like to put a face on things, to make them look like
humans or animals. It's more done for entertainment value than real
practicality."
The Japanese Robot Association predicts that next-generation robots will
generate up to $64.8bn (£42.8bn) in production and sales and $21.6bn in
applications and support. However the same organisation recently pointed
out that shipments of industrial robots actually fell 33 per cent in the
last quarter of 2008, and 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009.
Statistics from the British Automation and Robot Association show that,
since 2000, the annual number of industrial robots installed in British
businesses has fallen from a high of nearly 2,000 to fewer than 800.
Even taking the recession into account, demand for robots has been
dramatically down worldwide, putting a severe dent into the dream of
sparking another industrial revolution. Could it be that a flesh and blood
employee is still far in advance of most bots in terms of capability?
"The more you to do with robots the more you realise just how good humans
are," says Geoff Pegman, the managing director of one of Britain's few
robot manufacturers, R U Robots. "It's difficult to instruct robots,
especially in the office environment. For example, you can get them to
deliver coffee, but that's it," he says. Fortunately, the slow progress in
bringing intelligent mechanical help into the home, the office and even the
factory (welding, yes. Building a carburettor, no) means the doomsayers who
have been foretelling the collapse of civilisation and the dawn of human
obsolescence in the face of the machine have also got that completely wrong.
"Mass unemployment? They said the same about the computer -- how we would
all have nothing but leisure time as computers would be doing our jobs. And
this obviously is not the case," points out Pegman. And while the
prototypes are becoming more physically capable, robots are still failing
when it comes to the type of human common sense that allows us to walk
around a corner without having a confidence crisis.
"Without 'consciousness', robots are just spot welders, bolt-tightening
arms, burger flippers, spray painters, and factory drones that can swivel
dexterously back and forth in pre-programmed for assembly line work.
They're expensive toasters -- one-trick-ponies. It will be many decades
before anthropomorphic robots are going to be sentient," says Taro Hitachi,
a Tokyo-based Japan blogger and an expert in patents. "Decades of creating
fantasy robots, like Asimo, Aibo, Roborior et al, has bankrupted the
research and development departments of Japan while not resulting in any
viable products."
Nor does he accept that Japan's high robot count is a true reflection of
the reality: "Japan counts almost any kind of semi-autonomous factory
machinery as a 'robot', whereas in the rest of the world, milling machines
and potato pealing machines are just factory automation."
Meanwhile, those that we all recognise as proper, autonomous, humanoid
robots are finding their services hard sell to even in robot-friendly
Japan. The country's biggest robot maker Tmusk created the lifelike
Wakamuru robot five years ago, which it has pitched variously as a hospital
porter, a receptionist and, most recently, a decidedly wooden actor, but
has struggled to find interested clients. Costing £65,000 a piece, a rental
program was scrapped recently because of lack of interest. And now thanks
to the robot's less that scintillating talents, Tmusk's multibillion-yen
helper robot project is mothballed.
Likewise, Honda has been working on robots since 1986, but finding it hard
to make any money from its efforts. Culminating in the Asimo humanoid (its
name a play on the Japanese word for "legs"), it first became available for
rental in 2000. There has been no serious commercialisation of Asimo since
then and the droid still needs a small army of helpers whenever it
performs, although it has grown smaller and lighter over the years.
So why do big corporations still insist on throwing money at what Engleberg
derides as "toys"? According to robotics expert Lem Fugitt, the Japanese
are culturally predisposed to liking, even preferring, humanoid robots.
Secondly many still believe, as he does, that robots could save the country
from a fast approaching manpower shortage. He says: "Based on their Shinto
and Buddhist heritage, the Japanese tend to believe that most objects
incorporate some spirit and feel a connection with robots that move, that
is, are animated. They believe that robots, especially humanoid robots,
have many things in common with human beings."
Brought up on amicable robots such as Astro Boy, Japan is more ready to
accept robots than the west. One survey has shown that 83.6 per cent of
Japanese thought they would be able to live with robots.
Fugitt also points out that the biggest problems facing the country is a
rapidly growing senior population with the longest longevity of any nation,
and a shrinking number of active people in the workforce. Robots, he
believes, are expected to take up the slack.
"The solution of both of those problems requires the development of
advanced robotic systems, preferably in humanoid form. For the ageing
population, it means developing healthcare and nursing robots," he says.
For the shrinking work force it means supplementing human workers with
robots capable of taking responsibility for more complex and demanding
tasks than conventional factory automation robots have done in the past.
Despite numerous false predictions like this from the past, robot fans
still cling to the idea that machines can be a practical aid around the
home and even in hospitals.
"We think our robot will help make up for future labour shortages in an
aging society with fewer children," said Osamu Tsuchikura of Fujitsu's
robotics division shortly before his department was closed for good.
Instead, dreams of domestic robots have been eclipsed outside of Japan by a
sudden surge in the supply of a surplus of cheap, educated labour that
instead continues to do the hard work that was once considered likely to
become robots' domain. What could be automated is done manually now -- call
centres are just one example. But importing cheap labour as other nations,
including Britain, have done to address the problem of labour shortages is
not an option for Japan or South Korea. In fact Japan seems dead against
liberalising its immigration policy. But as the robots needed for the work
never materialised, Japan now faces sharp industrial decline.
The influx of cheap labour elsewhere, meanwhile, means putting the brakes
on technological development of robots in the workplace. Why waste billions
on research when there are cheap, skilled immigrants to do the job? The
only area where robotic research is moving along rapidly is in the
armaments industry -- witness the "drones" that the US is using in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. We may never see a friendly R2-D2 cooking our
suppers in any of our lifetimes -- but a Terminator, human shaped or
otherwise, is marching towards the frontline.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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