Charles D Hixson wrote:
Richard Loosemore wrote:
J Storrs Hall, PhD wrote:
On Friday 08 February 2008 10:16:43 am, Richard Loosemore wrote:
J Storrs Hall, PhD wrote:
Any system builders here care to give a guess as to how long it
will be
before
a robot, with your system as its controller, can walk into the
average suburban home, find the kitchen, make coffee, and serve it?
Eight years.
My system, however, will go one better: it will be able to make a
pot of the finest Broken Orange Pekoe and serve it.
In the average suburban home? (No fair having the robot bring its own
teabags, (or would it be loose tea and strainer?) or having a coffee
machine built in, for that matter). It has to live off the land...
Nope, no cheating.
My assumptions are these.
1) A team size (very) approximately as follows:
- Year 1: 10
- Year 2: 10
- Year 3: 100
- Year 4: 300
- Year 5: 800
- Year 6: 2000
- Year 7: 3000
- Year 8: 4000
2) Main Project(s) launched each year:
- Year 1: AI software development environment
- Year 2: AI software development environment
- Year 3: Low-level cognitive mechanism experiments
- Year 4: Global architecture experiments;
Sensorimotor integration
- Year 5: Motivational system and development tests
- Year 6: (continuation of above)
- Year 7: (continuation of above)
- Year 8: Autonomous tests in real world situations
The tests in Year 8 would be heavily supervised, but by that stage it
should be possible for it to get on a bus, go to the suburban home,
put the kettle on (if there was one: if not, go shopping to buy
whatever supplies might be needed), then make the pot of tea (loose
leaf of course: no robot of mine is going to be a barbarian tea-bag
user) and serve it.
FWIW, the average suburban home around here has coffee, but not tea. So
you've now added the test of shopping in a local supermarket. I don't
believe it. Not in eight years. It wouldn't be allowed past the cash
register without human help.
Note that this has nothing to do with how intelligent the system is.
Maybe it would be intelligent enough, if it's environment were sane.
But a robot? Either it would be seen as a Hollywood gimmick, or people
would refuse to deal with it.
Robots will first appear in controlled environments. Hospitals, home,
stockrooms...other non-public-facing environments. (I'm excluding
non-humanoid robots. Those, especially immobile forms, won't have the
same level of resistance.)
Well, I am not talking about the event proceeding without anyone
noticing: I assume it will be done as a demonstration, so what the
robot looks like will not matter. I imagine it would be followed by a
press mob.
The point is only whether the system could manage the problems involved
in doing the shopping and then making the tea.
And I think that other things will be happening at the same time anyway:
I suspect that new medicines will already be coming out of the lab,
from an immobile version of the same system. So if people are skittish
about the tea-making robot, they will at least see that there are other,
obviously beneficial products on the way.
Really, though, the question is whether such a system could be built,
from the technical point of view. My only point is that IF the
resources were available, it could be done. That is based on my
understanding of the timeline for my own project.
Richard Loosemore
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