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.
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, 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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By arrangement with The Independent
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.
