sudo make me a sandwich

“Mahru Z” is a robot developed by the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, and it’s  the closest thing yet to the classic sci-fi wet dream of an electromechanical manservant. It’s slow and lumbering gait won’t come as much surprise to anyone who’s seen these large bipedal robots walking around, it turns out replicating that sort of thing is quite a difficult feat, and the systems still have some kinks to work out.

Mahru does come with a wheeled model, “Mahru A” which conceivably can cross a kitchen in a decent amount of time. Christopher Doll had a post up on his blog a few days ago about how ostentatious he thought human-looking robots were, an affect for the sake of retro-futuristic nostalgia, and I think he’s partly right about that, particularly considering that wheels will do just about everything including stairs nowadays… everything else humanoid about a household robot makes sense from a design perspective (two arms, two eyes, a head voice recognition and command), even having more than two legs going, for the purposes of stability. But, humanoid robots are meant to be modular, to perform various tasks in an environment already designed for us simians to lope around in, and the less you have to pre-affect the environment, the better. It’s bad enough if I’ve got to pre clean my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, I wouldn’t want to pre-clean my apartment or arrange ingredients in nice, neat rows perpendicular to the edge of the counter so my robot can get some work done.

Nevertheless, Mahru Z demonstrates the current bleeding edge of the technology of replacing you getting up off your ass and walking (ta-da!) a few feet with the bread in your hand and putting it in the toaster yourself. It’s still got a ways to go but you can’t escape that “maybe the future I was promised was just off by half a century” feeling when you see it. A feeling which usually precedes “where in a just universe do these bastard kids with the backwards hats and the hippety-hop and the Pokemons get off having my robot future? Punk agitators!”

I was surprised to learn that Mahru’s Rosie schtick apparently owes a lot to an A.I. that can recognize objects and how to manipulate them, as I had assumed that the demonstrators just hard-coded the positions of all the objects in the staging area, and that these routines were essentially pantomime. You know, move the microwave a centimeter to the left and Mahru’s logic fuses start exploding like in Star Trek.  But then again, the video is cut in such a way as to suggest to me that there were some malfunctions and restarts we don’t get to see. Consider the simplest of tasks that you might want to leave to a robot butler, in terms of spatial reasoning, fine motor coordination, procedural and object memory… it’s probably a horribly complex ballet of skill and awareness that you take for granted because you’ve got years of training behind you, thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions, and a brain adapted by eons of evolution to those sorts of ‘fidgeting with nuts up in a tree while looking out for tigers’ sort of tasks. Which is a big part of the problem if we want robots to be able to figure that stuff out out of the box.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about neural nets and neurochips as a stopgap on the road to strong A.I., if it exists.  Getting a monkey’s brain to control a robot arms is already old news, and they’ve taught one to fly a flight simulator. It shouldn’t be impossible to get both human-equivalent thought and coordination with a neurochip  incorporating the motor cortex as well as the cerebrum. Or why bother with neurochips at all, given the power of brain-machine interfacing, you could just share your own brain-cycles with a robot that just knows what you’re thinking.

On the downside, this requires broadcasting the content and context of your thoughts and capabilities in a machine-readable format. And probably wearing some kind of silly hat whenever you want something done. And you’ll want the robot to have your sandwish made when you get home and it’ll really just stab your cute neighbor because it picks up on your subconscious resentment towards your mother because she just called you on the viso-phone-sor and you’re out of Miracle Whip anyway, so when you get home you have to explain to the cops why your robot is waiting at your door with a turkey on rye spread with human blood.

On the upside, your granddad would’ve had to break a sweat doing all that himself, what with the hacking and the sinews and the mopping and the shovelling and don’t even start with the heavy lifting.