“Living With Robots” – An Excellent Non-Technical Overview Of Robotics

This is a review of the third book sent to me recently by MIT Press, and the book is the best of the bunch. “Living With Robots,” by Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas is a good, non-technical book that discusses a number of issues with robots in human society. This is excellent for both business managers and those more generally interested in both the promise and reality of robots in society.

One exam of the accessibility of the material is in chapter 8, where there’s a discussion on reinforcement learning. There are good theoretical examples and how reinforcement learning has risks in the real world. I really liked the part where the authors discuss blending simulation and real world testing.

Chapters on understanding location, on movement, the sense of touch, and on other issues help describe the complexity and difficulty with integrating robots into society.

The chapter on appearance isn’t as good, and it ties into one of the few problems I saw with the book. In the early chapters, there are two problems; but they are problems for purists and others who want to talk about more theoretical issues (hence my interest…). First, the early focus, and one that threads throughout the book, is on humanoid robots. While there are excellent discussions about both the positive and negative aspect of the humanoid form, the focus seems excessive. I’ll admit, though, that will make the book more interesting to the broader audience.

The second issue is one about the definitions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The authors posit that the early manufacturing robots weren’t really robots because they aren’t as autonomous as modern robots. I respectfully disagree. Getting machines to repeatedly do complex operations was very new, and those machines definitely deserve the name. That we’ve used that learning to move past it and advance the concept doesn’t obviate what they did and were. In fact, today, manufacturing robotics are very similar, but have been extended more with vision, sensing, and other tools to help them begin to work in a mixed robot/human environment.

That ties into a line that made me smile. Later in the book the authors write “remember that once AI technology comes into common use, it usually loses the AI name.” I’ve been saying that for decades. What they don’t admit is that’s the case for robotics. When I was first studying AI, vision and robotics were part of AI, but were already beginning to be split off into their own disciplines.

The final humorous argument I have is if one example is really a robot. Aylett and Vargas describe a “robot” as a humanoid machine that doesn’t manipulate anything. It just provides information at a shopping center. How does that fit into their own definition of robot? It sounds more like an overgrown tablet computer with wheels. However, that’s a fun argument having nothing to do with the business value of whatever you want to call it.

Robots are becoming more advanced as we learn to help them interact better in the world. This book is an informative read in that it provides a broad overview of the key issues of robotics, and it does so at a non-technical level while still being clear. Yes, I have quibbles, but that’s because I’ve been in technology for quite a while. For people who haven’t been, and still want a book that provides an introduction to the state of our knowledge about robots, this is a great book to read.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidteich/2021/10/28/living-with-robots--an-excellent-non-technical-overview-of-robotics/?sh=7513526b140a