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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