Baby Bots

At the University of Washington there is a group of computer scientists and psychologists who are working together to develop a truly learning robot.  Currently in order to “teach” a robot to do something it has to be specifically programmed in that it should do that task.  This is significantly different than how humans learn and because we all like to compare everything to humans this group is attempting to create learning robots.  Human babies learn through observations; they see what their parents and other people whom they interact with do and imitate them in order to learn new skills.  The idea of a truly learning robot that could learn by observing other people would be very significant and would be a huge step in robotics.  By making this advancement in robotics the area of human robot interactions would be greatly changed and a whole new era of robotics would arise. 

The creation of learning robots would bring new benefits to the field of robotics as well as the world as a whole.  By having robots that learn there would be increases in productivity in workplaces that rely on robots to perform various tasks around the workplace.  It could also improve the safety of many tasks as it can be hard to program a robot to do certain things that can be dangerous tasks.  One example of this could be things such as firefighting and search and rescue missions.

There are also obvious negative consequences that would come from creating robots that can learn.  By creating learning robots many people could lose their jobs.  Many simpler jobs would most likely be replaced.  On example of this are people who place items on conveyor belts to go through a robotic assembly line.  If robots could learn these people could easily be replaced as the issue of not having a precise spot to grab the initial item from prior to its placement on the assembly line would be eliminated.  The robots would learn to be able to find where the item they needed to grab was so not being able to program a specific location to grab from would no longer be a barrier that prevents robots from taking this job over.  Another possible issue is that we won’t know how much these robots would be able to learn and how far it could go.  We wouldn’t want it to result in a Terminator like scenario in which the robots decide to over through the human population and kill us all off.

Obviously much of this is speculation and it very likely might not happen.  The project is still in its very beginning stages and only two scenarios have been observed with the project.  The idea is also to teach the robots to learn like babies and young children so the level at which the robots are anticipated to learn at is very low.  Although this is the plan it is still important to think about how far this could possibly go and prevent the robots from being too smart.

For more information:
http://www.popsci.com/robots-could-learn-same-way-babies-do 
 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141965