Robots for the Rest of Us Podcast

Jonas Coersmeier is an architect, designer, and educator with a radical take on artificial intelligence. In his book, Material and Artificial Intelligence in Architecture , he argues that AI is neither a tool that only does our will, nor a rival come to steal our place. Instead, he sees AI as a collaborator -- an entity that’s no more or less important than human beings in the work they all share....

The podcast is back! With a new, tighter focus: This is now an ongoing series of conversations about human relationships to artificial intelligence — that is, how people understand and experience these entities. That means I’ll be speaking with people about imagination, pretense, wishful thinking, our sense of ourselves, our sense of reality and related topics that seem simple until you really thi...

I am at ICRA – the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, aka 7,000 roboticists from all over the world converging to discuss every robot-related topic on Earth. More posts are coming, but for now, day-of, here is a quick podcast interview (the first with video) with, and about, one of the robots I saw in action today – Ameca, by Engineered Arts . After many an online video, thi...

Why hasn’t workplace artificial intelligence made life easier for everyone? Some surveys see a vast majority of employees saying AI adds to their workload, for a variety of reasons (having to check what the AI does, having bosses who expect increased output). And the extra stress of AI adoption is often worse for women, says leadership consultant Julie Donley . Why? Because AI is often oriented to...

Most people agree there’s something wrong with an AI pretending to be a human being. And especially wrong about an AI telling you it’s a human therapist . In fact, a California legislator introduced a bill the other day to ban AIs from doing that. It stemmed in part from an incident where a mental health platform had users thinking they were getting counsel from humans when in fact the messages we...

Data scientist Wes Chaar was at home a few years ago, working with the tools of his trade, when he had an “aha!” moment. He realized the information he was looking at would let him predict not only what people would buy and how they’d vote, but also how they’d feel about their choices. Those people might not have shared those feelings with anyone, but Chaar could foresee they’d be there. How are p...

We’re an aging society, with a shortage of young-ish people to do the work, paid and unpaid, of helping others get through life. (Immigration crackdowns will make this shortage more acute.) Inevitably, robots are coming to help us in the home. Maybe they’ll be 5-foot, 8-inch tall imitation people, as Elon Musk predicts . But arms, legs and torsos are expensive to build, complex to operate and kind...

Robot-makers often test the limits of the possible and make ingenious new technology. Can we make this? Can we make it do that twice as fast? Robot users , on the other hand, have different concerns, like “is it simple enough for my kid to understand?” or “if it gets knocked over, will it break?” or “how do I tell it not to come so close?” or “what happens if we move the table to the other side of...

People often see double when they see a robot. They know it’s just a collection of metal and plastic parts. And they think it might be sad after working so hard all day. Or mad. Or glad. Now that AI can talk, sing, laugh and cry, people are having the same kind of double sight when they talk to their virtual assistants and virtual friends. How can people perceive two beings in one body? One source...

Soon, AI companies expect to be selling “agents” — AIs that reserve tickets, cancel subscriptions and take other actions for their users. The companies are also talking up the power of generative AI to hold a natural conversation in real time. And, of course, AIs are also getting better at creating videos of real people. Combine all three, and you get the the new realm of the “digital human avatar...

In Eakta Jain’s urban, engineering-centric New Delhi childhood, the closest she got to intimacy with living things was watering the plants. Even the household pets were robots (both her parents worked in the field). Today, Jain is still into robots — she grew up to be  a computer scientist and robotic engineer herself. But she now spends a lot of time with horses. For good robotic reasons. Some ye...

Moxi is a human-sized wheeled robot that’s built to do hospital chores. It’s made by Diligent Robotics to free nurses and other staff to spend more time with patients and their problems (and less time walking down hallways and searching supply closets). More than 100 Moxis are working in hospitals around the U.S. To succeed, Moxi needs to be useful, welcome and easy to work with — a combination of...

How should we see robots as they roll (or walk, or fly, or swim) into our lives? As animals to train? Children to guide? Loyal servants? Amiable friends? Therapists? Or therapons ? Fellow workers? Fellow artists? People are likely to try on all these attitudes. The same person will probably cycle through some of them, maybe in the course of a single day of modern life in 2050. Agnieszcka Pilat is...

Decades before Karel Čapek coined the word "robot" in 1920, Americans and Europeans already dreamed of mechanical workers. Actually, they weren’t just dreaming, as Taylor Evans, of UC Riverside has found . The image for today's podcast is from an American patent, granted in 1868, for a man-shaped "steam carriage." Does it matter that, a little more than two years after the end of slavery, the head...

When robots were simpler it might have been reasonable to talk about them with generalizations about "people," "needs" and "experiences." But now robots are increasingly involved in day-to-day life, where these broad terms can’t capture all the variety of human experience with the machines. You have to ask: which people? whose needs? whose experiences? When they didn’t ask those kinds of questions...

How do you make a robot that people will actually want to use? That is, a robot that they understand without having to take a three-day training course, that they put to real work, that doesn’t give them the willies? One answer is, give it the shape of a person, with arms and legs and a head. Let it slip right in to a world made for people. That’s the humanoid-robot idea, which has been getting a...

Not long after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public, engineers at Levatas started tinkering with ways to incorporate it into the robots they furnish to big companies. Levatas supplies ways to automate industrial inspections. Their software guides robots that move through oil platforms, factories, power plants, breweries and other places that need constant monitoring to catch problems before they tu...

In his younger days Ken Goldberg had two versions of his CV: One for his wide-ranging work in robotics and artificial intelligence, another for his equally broad interest in making art. Nowadays it’s fair to say he has combined all his different passions into a single whirlwind of invention and exploration. His projects include the startups Ambi Robotics (whose robots are sorting a million package...

Most robots do badly in unpredictable situations. I’ve seen a dexterous robot stop its assembly work because a piece of plastic didn’t land precisely flat. A human worker would have nudged the thing into place without a thought. The robot halted and flashed a red light — bat signal for a human to come save the day. If robots are to live and work with people outside of assembly lines, they’re going...

For the past century, humans have imagined people-like robots but used robots that didn’t look like people at all. Only science-fiction people have robot butlers vacuuming the floor. Real-life people have Roombas. But things are changing. In 2024, real-life humanoid robots are working in factories and warehouses, for BMW and Amazon. Several well-funded companies are about to planning to soon churn...