this is the future of where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better i'm david blaney from high-tech washing machines to digital voice assistants such as alexa siri and cortana robots have become integral parts of many of our daily lives but while these technologies have proven useful their increasing intelligence has led to concerns of robots taking our jobs or even robot uprisings to explore the future of this topic further with me today is dr eleanor sandry an expert in human robot communication at curtin university thank you very much for coming in today eleanor hi there i'm pleased to be here how are robots changing what it means to be human well robots and to be honest technologies in general are often regarded by people as actually being intrinsically part of being human in fact because human life has always been associated closely with the use of technology the creation of technology et cetera if we're thinking about robots and the kind of newer technologies artificial intelligence technologies what we're beginning to see now is a continuation of what's a really long history of technologies and machines becoming something that humans are concerned to separate themselves from it's like to identify their humanity as against a robot and yet of course many people are intrinsically cyborgs already so i for example cannot operate without my contact lenses or my glasses i'm basically completely blind otherwise so i would consider myself already in some ways cyborg and those are possibilities that people now discuss much more and more about futures of technologies and robotic prosthetics but all sorts of other things i mean even from your basic pacemaker which can of course be hacked because it's an intelligent machine in fact um and then from the opposite side you have robots coming towards humans broadly robots are not normally organic in any way but people do do experiments with with small pieces of muscle fiber for example to actually power robots and power certain technologies and so they're beginning to kind of come closer together so really it's not that robots have changed much about how we think of ourselves as humans directly it's kind of we've always been very closely associated with technology but i guess that they're raising a lot of questions for people now around what they can do and what maybe humans are still the only ones capable of doing those things so ideas around um creativity the ideas of emotion empathy all of these things are now kind of coming up as part of people's designs for robots and for autonomous technologies and ai more generally do we have a a healthy relationship with robots we hear a lot about robots making decisions about us so you know a robot let me into this building um over the weekend i bought a ticket for something and a a robot asked me to prove that i wasn't a robot um robots replacing us in the workplace how's our relationship faring with robots well we do hear a lot about the potential for robots and ai and algorithms and machine learning systems to do harm to humans and there is no doubt that there are good examples where they have done harm to humans whether that's broad sections of society or a particular person but in fact i think it's really important to remember it's not just our relationship with robots themselves with the machines that are in question it's also our relationship with the people who develop those machines and the people who then go on to use them and so quite often the problems actually arise they're not really down to the machine in itself it's kind of doing the best it can but the way that a developer has chosen to program it the data set upon which it's been trained say if it's a machine learning program and of course the way it's implemented if it's implemented without human oversight it's very easy for things to go wrong robots and automated technologies more generally don't actually fare that well in complex physical real world environments they're very good within constrained spaces where things are under control but put them out into the real world and then there's a lot of potential for things to go wrong and sometimes it's quite difficult even even though you'll see reports in the news where someone will say oh they should have thought that this might happen or they should have taken more care with this but in fact it can be surprisingly difficult to plan ahead so it's really easy for these technologies if they're misused effectively i would say that being misused if they're just being put out there on their own then the chances of them harming someone are quite high and what are some of the most egregious misuses of robots that we that we see today well i mean we have the use of relatively simple systems actually in this country of course um to try to collect people's debts um and robo dicks absolutely and there's just i saw on the news today about them taking down part of the robot debt system that has clearly introduced something that's a very rule based system into an environment where really you actually need to make human decisions and the programmed machine is unable to make those decisions out of sufficient granularity in the states probably one of the biggest examples that people talk about is the way that they're using robots to deal with sentencing and in particular looking at recidivism so the chances that someone is going to re-offend and they're noticing of course completely unsurprisingly the robots aren't well the robots are racist but the robots are just um their bias is based on the data sets upon which they have been um trained and all they are doing is bringing to light the fact that in fact the whole judicial system is racist so it was us who erases the whole time we were racist first then you get your robot to be racist on your behalf and probably to actually become more racist in fact because they're very rule based so that's just how it works so the word robot uh tell us about the origin of the word robot it's a check word isn't it yes it is so um the word robot itself comes from the czech robota um robota was a term that um a playwright carol chapek well he was looking for a term for the um players in one of his who were going to seem to be you know rather um stayed non-emotional workers okay and his brother in fact joseph chappet came up with the term robota and so rossum's universal robots were born um those robots of course are interesting because they were organic they weren't actually machines like most of the vast majority of our robots now um and really the whole um story of the play is based around the fact that robota means always linked with ideas of forced labor so the positioning of these entities as slaves and that is something that is still part of conversations around robots now you know should should robots effectively be slaves to humanity and there are lots and lots of questions that that raises around what's going to happen if someone starts treating a machine as a slave how will that impact on their relationship with other beings in particular other humans if that robot looks human-like you know will that have more of an effect there's all sorts of questions to be asked around that and for me more broadly there's questions around whether it's actually worth trying to build intelligent machines you're then going to subjugate in that way and effectively just use them as tools when maybe what you should be doing is trying to work out ways of collaborating with them so you're actually capitalizing on all of that intelligence that you've put into the machine and combining it with human intelligence to do things much better and faster the notion of robots i guess becoming so smart that they decide to overthrow humanity and kill all of us it's a very sort of pervasive trope in pop culture since well forever what does that say about about us do we do we feel guilty uh for example or does it does that does that tell what's what does it tell us about us i think it mostly tells us that humans have a deep desire to be in control of everything all the time actually and that they are afraid of things that they don't fully understand and to be honest i think that with new technologies it is um worth being afraid of things that you don't understand and there's a lot of requests now that these new technologies become transparent so that people understand how they are making the decisions that they're making rather than the making a decision and then someone going well i don't know why i did that but clearly it must be right because it's been programmed you know and that they have this fallback position that the machine because it's being logical must be being correct and that is often not the case so it's also worth recognizing i suppose that a lot of these popular cultural stories come from the us europe trapex story is actually about ends up with the robots uprising and killing all the humans and if you look at other cultures i mean the big example always is japan then they have a totally different attitude towards their robots they're much more see their robots as friends um and so there's a completely different kind of cultural attitude and cultural set of stories but yeah if you look on a website like um wyatt or gizmodo they're reporting something about a robot then the chances are you're going to see a whole bunch of comments about the oh this is the sign of the robot uprising always skynet terminator almost yeah all these references come out why is that why is it that some places have have a much more positive relation a much more sort of positive relationship with robots in terms of how they see them i think it may show the importance of of popular cultural stories and those historical stories so if you you know you're in um europe the us you've got the story to maybe probably start with iur but even before that you've got the the golem in the jewish myths and the you know the fact that golems can run riot as well but you know if you get to rui then you've got you know metropolis there's a long history of things before you even get to terminator which are talking about machines taking over and basically getting rid of humans and if you look at stories elsewhere for instance within japan the most sighted one is going to be astro boy you know basically a hero story where the robot is a hero and a friend and also you have um embedded within some of their well some people's religious beliefs uh the ideas of animism and the fact that even a completely inanimate toy for example actually has a soul and so there's a completely different kind of myth and story set that kind of sits behind these assumptions over what's happening with technology particularly robots robots are getting i think i think it's fair to say that robots are getting pretty smart uh when should we start being concerned or should we even be concerned well i think probably the first thing to do is to question that initial statement like robots may seem to be getting smart but they're not really that smart most people don't see what what's happening currently in robotics or artificial intelligence is actually being that that smart in any kind of generalizable terms so they're often very um good at doing something within a narrow kind of set of rules or a narrow space of engagement but if you try to take them outside that they're still really not smart enough to deal with the world in fact so i would say that currently there's no need to worry about the robot uprising um i don't think they're going to take over the world i think that what we do need to be worried about is the people who are designing and developing these machines the people who are then implementing them without human oversight and without taking care of the sorts of decisions that they're making that are affecting people's lives um and though that's really where the concerns need to be and also more recent i've been reading increasingly and i'm actually quite worried about this the drive for newer and newer technology all the time is actually a part of our environmental crisis these technologies almost always require large amounts of power to exist and run and also of course they draw on precious minerals as well and so you've got dangerous mining conditions and you've also just got that that those taking of the minerals out of the earth as well which you know is just causing all sorts of concerns for people so much broader concerns than just being worried about the robot uprising or what's becoming too intelligent and kind of taking over i think those are the least important of the concerns do you think we maybe overestimate robots intelligence we think that it's because oh a computer decided so it must be right i think there is a tendency to do that um particularly where a system has been implemented by one set of people and is then being used by another they've been told probably how good that computer system is and they're very prepared to accept made by they're very prepared to accept it as taking responsibility for something when really maybe they should be questioning it more easily i think there are lots of reasons though why people fall into that um making those kind of mistakes a lot of it is to do with the way that um the media the technology media but now increasingly the mainstream media report these types of technologies the way that things are portrayed often they look like they're really operational um and that goes for things like atlas the atlas robot the humanoid robot from boston dynamics but also into things like google duplex all of these things you see them operating at their very best and people will write about them as if they are always operating at that kind of level but in fact there's going to actually be all sorts of underlying issues with them whenever i go and see a robot in a lab i can pretty much guarantee it won't be working when i arrive because it's all it's everything's stage managed often it is so some things in particular there was quite a lot of fuss around sofia a robot face very expressive face that seemingly talked intelligently in interviews a lot of fuss around this it was um it was given a form of citizenship um with the within um one of the arab states within saudi arabia yep that's right and it's it's not as intelligent as it seems um it's it's a program system it's programmed with speeches yes it has an amazingly expressive phase but it is not as intelligent as what it says would seem to suggest why is there this sort of space where a robot face becomes a little bit too real and it becomes a little uncomfortable whereas if you've got sort of just a basic sort of geometric sort of shape of maybe like okay here's a circle and a couple of little black dots why does that look why are we able to maybe connect with that more and see that as being more human than sort of some creepy humanoid face the jury is actually out a bit around this the most popular um theory which people will draw upon is um masahiro mori's uncanny valley which was originally um actually about still objects that become increasingly human-like and the fact that they will suddenly become corpse-like okay and then what was what happened was that that theory was then taken into moving robotics and animatronics and um it does seem i mean from my experience talking to people as well people who have those very realistic human-like heads sitting next to them on the desk you know they they do feel a bit creeped out by them and they don't like them and usually the problem is that they look very human-like until they start moving then there are certain little things that give them away okay so they're quite clearly not actually human and even if you look at some of the very best of these types of robots you will still be able to pick that it's a robot i would almost guarantee in general i think that robots which rely on us our ability to anthropomorphize even the simplest of shapes movement are actually more successful maybe they don't even need to have a face at all maybe it could be more about the way that they move maybe if they do have a face to have a simpler face probably the kind of space in which you see people using those sorts of faces most at the moment are actually to do with um medical environments where they're helping um particularly kids on the autism spectrum um to kind of get a little more a bit more easy around interacting with people in particular looking at faces which is a problem for some people not for everyone but for some people on that spectrum they find that that difficult and so a robot with a simple face that is completely non-judgmental not too expressive is something that actually they're going to find it easier to interact with but i think actually there's lots of potential for those sorts of faces just for everyone i don't really my research really is about questioning why we need to make robots look like us at all and why do we well most people spoil you most people say that they want to create human-like robots that behave or communicate in human-like ways to make them easier for us to communicate with but actually this falls into a couple of different traps i would suggest one is that it's very difficult to make robots that are really human-like as we've just been discussing um also it means that people then are interacting with it thinking it's going to be human-like when in fact it's probably going to fall short of that and they may well become disappointed and cease to interact with the robot there are tremendous possibilities for interacting with robots that are not human-like at all um that are actually shaped like household objects this has been shown in various experiments and research and the other problem i think is that people are now very focused on creating interfaces that kind of operate in what i might describe as an ideal human-like way so these voice assistants for example very much based around people being able to communicate with a voice so having a voice not everyone does some people are nonverbal and they still need to be able to use technology so if you start focusing only on creating voice interfaces for people who have very clear intonation and probably also a u.s accent then um or at least up front until things get developed a lot further down the line then effectively you're actually um removing that technology from the people who might need it the most so i think there are lots of issues around creating human-like interfaces but the reason that people do it up front is because they think it's going to be easier where easier goes in inverted commas and kind of isn't necessarily easier and also because it just looks cool there's nothing cooler than going out to a press conference or tech conference or someone saying okay alexa schedule an appointment and then alexa just does it even though it's not really it's just following a flowchart really it's not really yeah i mean that was google duplex they were very proud of duplex because of the way that um duplex that's the one that pretends to be a a human when you're calling a wrestler well originally it did they're now they they backtracked on that a bit because people were so upset um that people might be trying to communicate very politely with duplex when really they should be aware that they were communicating with the machine because it would do things like pretending to um for example well it didn't pretend to have an r it did aminar in the right sorts of places but whether or not you really want a robot to be able to do that simply to make it easier or more natural where you know natural also goes in inverted commas because not every person does that either um you know this idea of just wanting to make it seem human-like to that extent is is questionable you know do you really want your machine to communicate that way or would you like it to just be more direct more straightforward and maybe more precise so you know i mean it is it's a kind of um a trick which you write is very very good when you're showing something to a press conference that's what they decided what does the the future of of our relationship with robots look like well i'm concerned that the future of our relationship with robots and with other intelligent machines may not be as interesting as it could be unless we actually do start changing the way that we think about designing and developing these machines i would say that the ideal future from my perspective is adopting a much stronger acceptance of the fact that humans collaborating with machines is a really good way forward it's a good way forward in terms of workspaces because it involves using both the skills and abilities of the machine and the human together to finish to complete tasks we already see it to a certain extent in factories but often the drive is to remove humans from those environments to save money for example whereas in fact looking at humans and machines working together will almost certainly provide more interesting solutions i think that looking you know for full autonomy always is probably increasingly going to be well people are going to become more aware of the environmental concerns around that and also i think just the the human concerns around that where really we want to have human oversight over decision making systems or over robots that are killer robots or war even for example where we actually want to have distributed systems of control where humans our machines are actually working together that i think it would be a good future it's not necessarily the future that we're heading towards what what needs is that too hot what needs to what needs to change for us to be heading towards the better future as opposed to the the crappy one that we're hurtling well i think that um there's a big drive currently to involve ethical thinking and ethics more generally in technology design of technology and also implementation of technology i think that is a key thing there's now quite a lot of really useful actually positive practical work in that area so the um ieee the institute of electrical and electronic engineers has a special working party that has produced something called ethically aligned design which is a really good um document that has brought together lots of different people's opinions around the world on technologies and how they should be developed in the future to be more ethical i think that we are a bit trapped currently by um kind of commerce and economics in the in the large countries in particular um and um you know the fact that mostly this is about making money and not actually about making lives better so it's always worth looking at these companies and when you see them saying that they're developing ai for good or robotics for good or whatever they actually question what their what they are actually good dividends because it could well be to do with making money rather than actually making people's lives better i think that you know getting more people involved on the ground getting communities involved in understanding how these technologies work and whether they want like do they want self-driving cars on their roads if they are going to come onto the roads how are they going to come onto the roads how are they going to be introduced there's often a lot of practical problems and questions that aren't really raised early enough in these sorts of developments so i think that you know definitely positive ways ahead but a lot of it does involve really embedding ethical thinking within this type of technology and within these types of technology companies and also probably now increasingly within government as well because i don't think many of us rely on our governments to protect us from these sorts of things at the moment is it possible for robots to become self-aware is that is that even forget about whether it will happen or won't happen is it even possible for that to i have no idea i actually don't think that i certainly don't have the scientific or neurological chops to answer that question i think that um it's also very difficult to even understand the differences between the awareness of um different organic beings anyway and there are also questions then around the awareness of um different people when they're in various situations and how you tell when someone's aware when they cut you know we often assume that someone who's non-verbal may be not aware or someone who is paralyzed you know and in fact we're wrong um so there are lots of issues around identifying what it means to be aware i mean really robots already are they sense their environment almost you know the sorts of robots that i write about sense their environment and respond to it they have behaviors and in many ways they are already aware that's what allows them to do what they do at all but when you say it where of course you're meaning much more sort of fully conscious self-aware you're moving into all of those ideas around sentience those questions are very difficult to answer i don't think it's coming anytime soon and i also think that we should probably consider the fact as a lot of science fiction does um that um robots will be aware and self-aware in very different ways from us because they don't have the same sorts of bodies as us they don't have the same sorts of neurological systems they don't have the same sorts of chemicals rushing around their bodies that cause us to have feelings you know the question of whether not robots really have emotions or feelings is not really out as far as i'm concerned they don't not in any kind of human-like way and yet they may have behaviors that seem to indicate that they have feelings or emotions so you see it's a very difficult question to answer well it's similar to how if i had my if i had my phone out here and i i was to say something rude to the voice assistant on it it would react to it but of course that's just a pre-programmed response it is and interestingly voice assistants have their different ways of dealing with those situations siri is a bit more sassy for example than alexa interesting what is a sexy question i could ask google i wouldn't try risking it right now because you know you don't want to work with robots children or animals in my experience well let's let's have it a shot what's your favorite color i like simultaneously thinking about every color at once but mostly i love google's colors someone got paid a lot of money to come up with that answering and you'll find that there are different answers as well so you won't always get the same one that's part of trying to build into these um programs is kind of um unpredictability uh which is something that summer robotics and technologists write about as being important you know to keeping people's interest in engaging with the machine but again it's questionable over how much time and money should be spent on that kind of why do robots fixate and fascinate her so much i think because humans have always been um fascinated by by building things that seem to be intelligent um or writing about people building things that seem to be intelligent that um in some texts that's kind of regarded as a sort of a god complex there have been people who have noted that some of the early technologists at mit and in other places for example really felt that their creation of robots was something like the creation of a new species you know i suspect that that underlies some of it i think people like being clever and they like creating things that seem clever one one final question before we uh we finish up what's your favorite uh robot text or movie or book your favorite fictional robot right so i have to start with um books first because that's really where i came into this research area from and my favorite books are e m banks is culture novels banks writes about a utopian future in which humans and machines coexist in a shared society and although in fact the machines are basically in control all the time i mean they're hyper intelligent um there are written into those texts both robots in the form of drones and also humans that are valued by the machines that run that society for their very humanity often for their intuitive thinking for their abilities to be flexible in certain situations so i just find those texts really interesting but that's really where i started like i read banksy's stories and i was like this is the sort of relationship i'm interested in between humans and machines that are definitely not human-like in fact they are quite startlingly different in the way that they think and speak and act and so um i was fascinated by that in contrast with the sorts of human-like machines i was far less attracted to um in terms of like popular text a bit more up-to-date at least i would say that my favorite film is still actually interstellar which i know is a few years old now but because again robots in interstellar are not human-like and i just love the idea of having a robot that you can dial up and dial down things like humor and sarcasm and honesty the whole idea of being able to tailor a robot to kind of suit your personality but being very different from you as well is really interesting i like the fact that you could tailor them for different situations i just think it's a it breaks down that idea of it's still a control idea and yet of course those robots were tremendously powerful could go into spaces that humans could not such as a black hole um and um so it raises a lot of really interesting questions so i reckon those are my favorite texts at the moment well a little bit less sophisticated i was going to go for um uh uh probably baymax from big hero 6 and uh and wally from wally yes i think that's probably why i i'm a bit different from some other people because i tend to be looking for these oddities rather than looking for the cute not so interesting cute robots i'm much more interested in robots that maybe challenge us to think differently that we can collaborate with and actually do things really in really interesting ways well uh my goodness me i'm just elinda thank you very much for coming in and sharing your knowledge on this topic well thanks for inviting me it's been great i've enjoyed answering these questions and and thank you for listening you've been listening to the future of a podcast powered by curtin university if you have any questions about today's topic please feel free to get in touch or follow the links in the show notes [Applause] you
2021-09-19