Salon.com > robots

Robots don’t destroy jobs!

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:39:00 +0000

Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that's not the real story. The fact is that automation creates jobs. It's the misuse of corporate profits that is destroying them.

There was a time when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post-World War II decades when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career-long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

Two ways of looking at robots

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 19:47:00 +0000

Who welcomes our new robot overlords?

This week brings two radically different perspectives on how robots are changing the world. Marketplace quotes Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian programmer who helped develop Skype, on the dangers of self-replicating technology: "Once we have something that is no longer under control" says Tallinn, "once technological development is yanked out of our hands, it doesn't have to continue to be beneficial to humans."

Machines which we can't control, which sounds a lot like the grey goo problem, is just one of the topics that will be studied at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, an organization co-founded by Tallinn to examine threats to the continuing existence of humanity.

Tallinn explains:

Humanity is seriously under-invested in them. For example, we're spending more money in lipstick research than we are in making sure that we survive this century as a species. Worrying about long-term issues is definitely something that very few people are doing. Therefore my time and my money can actually make a big difference in that area.

Don’t fall in love with your robot

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:35:00 +0000

THE ROBOT IS SMILING AT ME, his red rubbery lips curved in a cheery grin. I’m seated in front of a panel with 10 numbered buttons, and the robot, a three-foot-tall, legless automaton with an impish face, is telling me which buttons to push and which hand to push them with. Touch seven with your right hand; touch three with your left.

The idea is to go as fast as I can. When I make a mistake, he corrects me; when I speed up, he tells me how much better I’m doing. Despite the simplicity of our interactions, I’m starting to like the little guy. Maybe it’s his round silvery eyes and moon-shaped face; maybe it’s his soothing voice—not quite human, yet warm all the same. Even though I know he’s just a jumble of wires and circuitry, I want to do better on these tests, to please him.

Four fingers are enough

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:59:00 +0000

A robot that can reproduce the dexterity of the human hand remains a dream of the bioengineering profession. One new approach to achieving this goal avoids trying to replicate the intricacy of the bones, joints and ligaments that produce our most basic gestures.

The Sandia Hand

A Sandia National Laboratories research team has adopted just such a strategy by designing a modular, plastic proto-hand whose electronics system is largely made from parts found in cell phones. The Sandia Hand can still perform with a high level of finesse for a robot, and is even capable of replacing the batteries in a small flashlight. It is expected to cost about $10,000, a fraction of the $250,000 price tag for a state-of-the-art robot hand today.

The researchers were able to scrimp in a number of clever ways. “One was scouring the globe for the least expensive, highest-performing components like motors, gears, etcetera,” says Curt Salisbury, the project’s principal investigator. “Another was to build the entire electronics system from commodity parts, especially those found in cell phones. We also moved from metal structural elements to plastic, being careful to design the structures so plastic would provide adequate strength.”

The Sandia Hand’s fingers are modular and affixed to the hand frame via magnets. This gives the researchers the flexibility to design interchangeable appendages tipped with screwdrivers, flashlights, cameras and other tools. The fingers are also designed to detach automatically to avoid damage if the hand hits a wall or other solid object too hard. The researchers say the hand can even be manipulated to retrieve and reattach a fallen finger.

Replaceable Fingers

The Hand’s current incarnation has only four fingers, including the equivalent of an opposable thumb. “It turns out that for a wide range of manipulation tasks that humans do, four fingers is enough,” Salisbury says. Still, future iterations of the Hand could have any number of fingers and any arrangement of those fingers without adding much cost or complexity, he adds.

Sandia Hand control glove

Although the Hand might someday be programmed to operate autonomously, for now a human controls the device using either a sensor-laden glove or a basic control panel. The glove is a custom design that reads a person’s hand posture and attempts to replicate that with the robot hand, Salisbury says. The communication protocol right now is a USB cable, but could be upgraded to include any wireless communications approach, he adds. The team’s goal is to develop a glove that costs about $1,000.

At such a low cost, and with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding the project, the Hand might be a welcome addition to mobile robots involved in disarming and disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The U.S. military has deployed thousands of unmanned ground robots worth hundreds of millions of dollars to disarm IEDs used against troops in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade. Many of these devices, such as iRobot’s PackBot, are driven by remote control into dangerous areas where they use clamp-like metal claws to search for and dispose of bombs. A significant amount of the money spent on these battle bots goes toward spare parts to replace those damaged in the field. One of Sandia’s goals is to offer greater proficiency at disarming (rather than detonating) bombs.

Sandia researchers are experimenting with upgrades to the Hand, including a palm with two embedded cameras that convey stereo images to a human operator during a grasping sequence. “After that,” Salisbury says, “we hope this technology will move to field tests.”

In the video below, the Sandia Hand demonstrates a number of capabilities, including lifting a suitcase, picking up a telephone handset and, perhaps most impressively, dropping a AA battery into a flashlight.

Images and video courtesy of SandiaLabs.

About the Author: Larry is the associate editor of technology for Scientific American, covering a variety of tech-related topics, including biotech, computers, military tech, nanotech and robots. Follow on Twitter @lggreenemeier.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.