• Question: if you had the resources would you build a robot with super human abilities

    Asked by honeybadger to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I don’t think I would! I’ve seen too many sci-fi movies about artificial intelligence taking over the world to be confident my robot wouldn’t become a ‘bad guy’! 😉

      Also, at the moment it looks as though it’ll be unlikely that we build a very advanced robot for a very very long time. The most advanced robot we have at the moment can only just about walk or run well! Here’s that QI episode with it on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3gb6p_Y9-c

      The reason it’s difficult to make a good robot is because of how complex the human brain system is, linked with nerves to all of the muscles in the body. The brain has something called proprioception, an understanding of where our limbs are in space because of the nerves feeding back to our brain – this alone has been a huge challenge for people making robots because of just how much information there is to feed back in such a short space of time in such a small structure – the human body is truly incredible, it took millions of years of evolution for us to get here, it’s not surprising that robots are difficult to make in our own image!

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Hi honeybadger,

      Contrary to what the sci-fi movies suggest, building a robot that has `super-human abilities’ is essentially impossible. While we are spending a large amount of time trying to mimic the human body in its huge complexity, some of our most successful robotic systems are actually very, very simple. Some of the work I’m doing is looking at how such simple controllers can get more advanced behaviour just by using more than one robot (similar to how ants and bees can do more if they work together).

      As Jen mentioned, there have been a number of attempts at building more and more complex robots, trying to solve different problems — although I personally prefer BigDog to Asimo (http://youtu.be/W1czBcnX1Ww) especially as it looks a bit like Bambi when it slips on the ice (at around 1.30mins in). The problem with all of these attempts is that they require huge computers to work out how to walk or how to do basic stuff, which isn’t very helpful when it comes to real-life situations, as neither Big Dog nor Asimo would be able to climb into a collapsed building a help stranded people. This is where smaller, simpler robots come in handy, and where the future of robotics is likely to be, because they are cheaper to build, cheaper to develop, and they can do a huge amount. In this case, bigger isn’t always better, and so I wouldn’t build a robot with super-human abilities, I would build lots of smaller robots that *together* could have super human abilities. Just because it would be cool.

      James

    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      Like Jen says I think i’d be far too scared to do this! So I think if I had the resources to build a super robot I might find something else to do with them like maybe using the robots movement ability to help people who are paralysed with some kind of robot like structure to support them!

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