• Question: do you think we will rely on robots in the future to help us with things we take for granted today? or do you think they will help us more in solving issues such as cancer?

    Asked by Emma to Rob, Josh, Chris on 22 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Josh Meyers

      Josh Meyers answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      We will definitely rely on machines and robots to help us with tasks we take for granted. Rubbish sorting, driving public transport and predicting the weather forecast are all examples of this that we already take for granted.

      They are already helping us fight other issues such as cancer. At the hospital where I work, there is a robot called the cyberknife that targets cancer with a beam of radiation, it does real time imaging of the patent and even adjusts for their breathing!

      Robots and machines are integrated into every part of our present and future.

    • Photo: Chris Armstrong

      Chris Armstrong answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      God thats a good question, and I advise anyone reading this to watch the short docu by CPG Grey entitled “Humans Need Not Apply” which addresses this topic in a light and yet detailed way.

      I think robots will quickly replace things that takes human time but little thought. Anything monotonous can be replaced by a robot fairly quickly, it just has to be cost effective to develop one. For example, any method of transportation at the moment could be done by a robot, planes basically already fly themselves, trains have done for years and self driving cars exist – the one reported incident involving them was when a human made a mistake. This will eventually remove the need for taxi workers, bus drivers, pilots, and train drivers.

      These will just be “machines” programmed to do exactly that one thing, they wont be very “smart” or adaptive to situations, only able to react to situations that their programmer thought of for example. However there are smarter robots out their, so called self-learning ones, ones that have been taught to teach itself rather than taught to do something. The teach a man to fish idiom springs to mind.. In fact there is one so generally smart that it beat the best trivia minds on the planet on the american quiz show jeopardy and when its done doing that it sits back and helps doctors diagnose cancer. Watson – IBMs latest baby.

      Watson is essentially the worlds best pattern recognition machine, it can look at case studies from all around the world access vast amounts of data in seconds and correlating results. It doesn’t have a bias, it doesn’t exhibit favour for treatment (yet though a scary thought is that answers could be bought and sold by the owners of advance robots like Watson) it simply suggests the most likely answer based on the facts it has to hand and the entire wealth of human knowledge behind it.

      All that and we still haven’t developed real AI. There are programs that can program things better than humans, adapting to tasks but they are still limited, following a series of rules set forth by who spawned the initial program. But they lack imagination, they are just relentless.

      Before I digress – I was considering writing out a piece about password breaking as I think its a good way to compare Smart vs Intelligent for robots but it became very long and convoluted so – I will simply end with a link to the video I mentioned above.

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