Ok, so I like to read John Derbyshire’s columns on NRO. His latest one discusses two solutions to labor shortage problems: to import labor (as Saudi Arabia does), or to automate (as Japan does). He mentions Japan’s push toward creating machines to care for their aging population: for example, “human-washing” machines.

It’s been a few years since I worked in robotics, but back then it was indeed my impression that the Japanese were serious about developing service robots for assisting the elderly and disabled. It is also my experience that the Japanese make awesome robots, mechanically. Just look at Honda’s Asimo and Sony’s QRIO. The idea of the humanoid robot, besides being just too cool, is that, because it is human-shaped, it could simply step in to any job and take the place of a real person, without requiring changes to tools or the work environment.

The problem is that, while specialized industrial automation has been around for quite some time, making general-purpose robots that are capable and smart enough to be useful is hard. Marvin Minsky thinks that focusing on hardware can actually be a distraction: “Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart.” I certainly wasted a lot of time repairing robots, that’s for sure.

I’d still like to have one of them Asimos, though.

Posted in uncategorized on April 20th, 2004 by Thibodeaux | RSS 2.0 |