Robotic Blogs

Update on earlier story:
Hoboken city officials are taking Robotics Parking, Inc to court to force them to allow control over the Garden Street robot garage. Officials claim that Robotics Parking found a way to change the passcodes to the garage remotely. Robotics was ousted as operator of the machine a few days ago.

Hundreds of cars are trapped inside the muli-story robot garage and no amount of coaxing will make it set them free. ("Say the magic word.")

From one angry customer:
"Today is my day off and I was supposed to go surfing at Sandy Hook," said Bruce Lamonte, 45, who was dressed in shorts and flip flops while waiting to hear about his car yesterday afternoon. "I'm hoping that my car will come out soon so I can salvage part of the day, either that or clean the house." (I wonder if he uses a robot vacuum cleaner.)

By Friday evening they were able to retrieve some of the cars by manually entering passcodes. The robot is still crippled though becasue they do not have an operating manual and Robotics will not help. Says Dennis Clarke, general manager of Robotics, "If you own the copyright, you have a right to use it. They are not entitled to our source codes. This is very critical proprietary information covered under contract law and intellectual properties."

Dennis Clarke denies that they tampered with the garage but says, "I prayed on the beach this morning and (the codes) all changed."

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NewJersey Journal

NEC's rotund little robot PaPeRo was recently spotted all over Paris. Now the reason becomes clear.
He was evidently in France for wine tasting training.

NEC and MIE University have coaxed the little robot into identifying 30 types of wine and expect that he will learn many more.


Without a mouth he tastes the wine through infrared light and sensors in a special finger. Last year he had learned to analyze the nutritional content of food by tasting it. What's next? Biometric id of people by taste? ("Hey! Pull my finger!")


The PaPeRo robot platform is designed for research in creating a personal robot for the home. It can perform household chores and also download to a PDA so CG PaPeRo can go "virtually" anywhere.


New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Wine-tasting robot to spot fraudulent bottles

Many people worry that after robots take over all the jobs then humans will have nothing to do.
There is really no reason to worry for a few reasons. First, if the robots are so smart that they take all the jobs then they should be smart enough to figure out how to make more jobs for humans.
Secondly, robots will never really take over all the jobs. There are some tasks that robots just will never be able to do. Scientists are working on Artificial Intelligence (AI) but 'intelligence' is not all there is to being human. In order to completely replace humans, robots would also have to have built in artificial stupidity. Maybe artificial 'humanity' would be a better term.

Humans can do things and think things that they could never explain or sometimes not even recognize that they are doing. Robots will always need the humans to perform the tasks that do not require 'intelligence' per se but rather some kind of feeling. Like voting for their favorite American Idol.

There are some examples lately of the type of jobs that humans can look forward to in a robot dominated future.
Scientists at Colombia University Laboratory for Intellingent Inaging and Neural Computing have hooked up people to brain monitors to measure their reactions to pictures. There is sometimes an 'aha' moment of recognition when a person sees something interesting. By connecting the person to a computer they can scan volumes of pictures and mark the ones that get a reaction. The viewer-person does not even have to be aware that they bleeped on a picture. They just sit and watch and let their brain do all the work. More...

In a more practical (read commercial) application of human sense and nonsense look at Amazon Mechanical Turk.
This service matches tasks too difficult for a computer to people who want to work on such tasks. The jobs are broken into very small pieces, called Human Intelligence Tasks or HIT's, that pay 1 cent and up each.
There are some high-paying tasks like transcribing podcasts that pay a few dollars, but most of them are for pennies, literally.
The jobs include identifying features in pictures, helping identify meanings of words on web pages, answering matching questions and checking the work of the other HIT's.

I think we have barely begun to discover what people are willing to do for pennies in their spare time. I made $0.93 while watching TV last night for about an hour of clicking.
Aaron Koblin, a grad student at UCLA, paid people 2 cents each to "draw a sheep facing left." In 40 days he got over 10,000 sheep drawings which he now sells at The Sheep Market as sheets of stickers at 20 for $20.

So do not despair that robots will take all our jobs. We will adapt and fill in the gaps left after the robots are occupied doing all the so called 'intelligent' jobs.