Meaningful Futures With Robots

Soon, robots will leave the factories and make their way into living rooms, supermarkets, and care facilities. They will cooperate with humans in everyday life, taking on more than just practical tasks. How should they communicate with us? Do they need eyes, a screen, or arms? Should they resemble humans? Or may they enrich social situations precisely because they act so differently from humans? Meaningful Futures with Robots: Designing a New Coexistence provides insight into the opportunities and risks that arise from living with robots in the future, anchored in current research projects on everyday robotics. As well as generating ideas for robot developers and designers, it also critically discusses existing theories and methods for social robotics from different perspectives - ethical, design, artistical and technological – and presents new approaches to meaningful human-robot interaction design. Key Features: Provides insights into current research on robots from different disciplinary angles with a particular focus on a value-driven design. Includes contributions from designers, psychologists, engineers, philosophers, artists, and legal scholars, among others. Licence line: Chapters 1, 3, 12, and 15 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.crcpress.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more. With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Award-winning journalist David Ewing Duncan considers 24 visions of possible human-robot futures—Incredible scenarios from Teddy Bots to Warrior Bots, and Politician Bots to Sex Bots—Grounded in real technologies and possibilities and inspired by our imagination. What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate about our human-robot future? For even as robots and A.I. intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology–it’s also about what robots tell us about being human.

This volume brings together academics from evolutionary biology, literary theory, robotics, digital culture, anthropology, sociology, and environmental studies to consider the impact of robotics and AI on society. By bringing these perspectives together in one book, readers gain a sense of the complex scientific, social, and ideological contexts within which AI and robotics research is unfolding, as well as the illusory suppositions and distorted claims being mobilized by the industry in the name of bettering humanity’s future. Discussions about AI and robotics have been shaped by computer science and engineering, steered by corporate and military interests, forged by transhumanist philosophy and libertarian politics, animated by fiction, and hyped by the media. From fiction passing as science to the illusion of AI autonomy to the business of ethics to the automation of war, this collection recognizes the inevitable entanglement of humanity and technology, while exposing the problematic assumptions and myths driving the field in order to better assess its risks and potential.

Cover subtitle: From everyday to out of this world.

Explains how artificial intelligence is pushing the limits of the law and how we must respond.

Stories from the future of intelligent machines—from rescue drones to robot spouses—and accounts of cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. Tech prognosticators promised us robots—autonomous humanoids that could carry out any number of tasks. Instead, we have robot vacuum cleaners. But, as Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo report, advances in robotics could bring those rosy predictions closer to reality. A new generation of robots, directly inspired by the intelligence and bodies of living organisms, will be able not only to process data but to interact physically with humans and the environment. In this book, Floreano, a roboticist, and Nosengo, a science writer, bring us tales from the future of intelligent machines—from rescue drones to robot spouses—along with accounts of the cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. These stories from the not-so-distant future show us robots that can be used for mitigating effects of climate change, providing healthcare, working with humans on the factory floor, and more. Floreano and Nosengo tell us how an application of swarm robotics could protect Venice from flooding, how drones could reduce traffic on the congested streets of mega-cities like Hong Kong, and how a “long-term relationship model” robot could supply sex, love, and companionship. After each fictional scenario, they explain the technologies that underlie it, describing advances in such areas as soft robotics, swarm robotics, aerial and mobile robotics, humanoid robots, wearable robots, and even biohybrid robots based on living cells. Robotics technology is no silver bullet for all the world’s problems—but it can help us tackle some of the most pressing challenges we face.

Tomorrow's robots, which includes the humanoid robot, can perform task like tutoring children, working as tour guides, driving humans to and from work, do the family shopping etc. Tomorrow's robots will enhance lives in ways we never dreamed possible. No time to attend the decisive meeting on Asian strategy? Let your robot go for you and make the decisions. Not feeling well enough to go to the clinic? Let Dr Robot come to you, make a diagnosis, and get you the necessary medicine for treatment. No time to coach the soccer team this week? Let the robot do it for you. Tomorrow's robots will be the most exciting and revolutionary things to happen to the world since the invention of the automobile. It will change the way we work, play, think, and live. Because of this, nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific research. These days, robotics is offered in almost every university in the world. Most mechanical engineering departments offer a similar course at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. And increasingly, many computer and electrical engineering departments are also offering it. This book will guide you, the curious beginner, from yesterday to tomorrow. The book will cover practical knowledge in understanding, developing, and using robots as versatile equipment to automate a variety of industrial processes or tasks. But, the book will also discuss the possibilities we can look forward to when we are capable of creating a vision-guided, learning machine. Readership: Upper-level undergraduates, graduates and researchers in robotics &automated systems, artificial intelligence, machine perception and computer vision.