Sci-fi buffs never tire of discussing Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws for Robots. As these laws are intended to keep the machines from hurting us, a more apt title would be Asimov’s Three Laws For Controlling Robots. With a bow to Asimov, I’d like to present my Three Laws for Understanding Robots. Trust me, this’ll be easy...and fast.


LAW I: EVERYTHING THAT IS EASY FOR ROBOTS IS HARD FOR US. CONVERSELY, EVERYTHING THAT IS EASY FOR US IS HARD FOR THEM.

This law is not at all obvious and results in endless confusion. We see machines beating the best chess players. We know that Google can search a billion web pages in a second. These feats are impossible for us, so we assume the machine is hugely superior. Yes, but in an idiot savant kind of way.

Now make a list of things you could easily do when you were eight. Go to the fridge and get a Sprite. Walk into a room and recognize all the faces. Cross a busy street or play hopscotch...No machine in the world can do these “easy” things.    

LAW II: FOR A ROBOT TO FUNCTION IN THE WORLD AS WELL AS WE DO, IT HAS TO KNOW AS MUCH ABOUT THE WORLD AS WE DO.

 Here again, the experts got it wrong. Early theory was that you make a really smart computer, give it a lot of rules and send it out into the world. Wrong, doesn’t work. The world is too chaotic and unpredictable.

  While we’re children, we are learning a million details about the world--lumps on the sidewalk, liquid in a puddle, animals scurrying by. Imagine a robot who doesn’t understand these things trying to navigate from one house to another.
 
The experts began to figure this out around 1985, and a cloud descended over robotics. Practical people said, okay, we’ll just accumulate a universal database of EVERYTHING the typical human knows. Think of the magnitude of this one project! Which segues to the next Law....
 
 LAW III: A REALLY HUMAN-LIKE ROBOT IS NOT ONE THING THAT ONE GENIUS WILL ONE DAY INVENT. A ROBOT IS A THOUSAND SUB-SYSTEMS THAT WILL BE CREATED ONE BY ONE OVER DECADES AND CENTURIES, USUALLY IN RESPONSE TO OTHER CHALLENGES.

There are two ways to judge a robot’s sophistication. How many tricks can it do? And in how large a setting or domain? The first robots will do only a few tricks (e.g., vacuum the floor) and in a very limited domain (rooms with all hazards removed or rooms with embedded wires that guide the machine). Graduating up to many tricks, and from a limited domain out into the world, is the dream.

Right now, robotics is advancing steadily on five wide but distinct fronts: smart computers for our businesses; tireless robots for our factories; artificial limbs and organs for our injured; sensors to detect chemicals and invisible dangers; and, finally, “expert software” that enables a computer to do a single activity at a high level (e.g. play chess, diagnose illness, find oil, or translate a language). This galaxy of projects is converging, for the most part coincidentally, toward the robots imagined by science fiction. The Three Laws explain why the convergence is happening much more slowly than many predicted.

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Where we are now: The media often refer to radio-controlled devices (the military is developing a lot of these) as “robots.” At most, these devices are rudimentary, entry-level robots. A machine becomes a robot to the degree that it can act and decide on its own. At the other extreme, Hollywood movies show robots acting and deciding with abandon, like slightly odd humans. It would be foolish to say such machines will never be built; so far, however, we have taken only baby steps.... 

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That should be more than enough to start a good discussion in any classroom....But the above material is only about 40% of "UNDERSTANDING ROBOTS," a new essay on Improve-Education.org.

Robotics is a supremely important topic but a very elusive one. The experts, highly specialized, don't agree on very much. "UNDERSTANDING ROBOTS" is an attempt to give the general public some perspective on a complex subject.

Basically, what's been happening the last 100 years is that sci-fi writers casually conjure up anything they want (robots, time travel, humans on Saturn). But the difficulty of making any of these things happen is VAST!

The complete article gives a fuller version of the Three Laws and then deals with where robotics will go. Will robots become like humans?? The article argues that they won't--but the field is going to give us a lively ride anyway! Look for Essay #17 on Improve-Education.org.