Shah and Major look into the near and less-near future of human-robot cooperation in What to Expect When You’re Expecting Robots (Basic, Oct.).
One of your chapters is titled “When Robots Are Too Good.” Why would this be a problem?
LM: That a robot may be so good at its job that people begin to rely on it too much, or use it in ways beyond how the designers intended.
JS: Yes, for example, think of your car GPS. When it was first introduced, it turned out that the better GPS works overall, the easier it is to follow the directions when you shouldn’t. We saw many news articles about people who followed their GPS without paying attention to their surroundings and ended up in lakes or rivers or other dangerous situations. Going on 10 years or so, we’ve calibrated GPS a bit better, and this happens less often. With robots, we need to be thinking about unintended consequences right from the beginning, as we look toward using them for everything from grocery shopping to helping watch our kids.
On that last point, could robotics lead to more gender equity, by relieving the burdens placed on working moms?
JS: I don’t think that’s guaranteed. Robots won’t likely be able to do all of our household tasks, and we’ll have to figure out how best to make use of their strengths, and work with them in a team of sorts. But not all human-robot teams are created equal either. When robots are introduced in factories, they may help productivity but at the expense of worker satisfaction, by making the job less social, less interesting and varied. What we want this book to be is a road map for how we can get around these potholes and develop the technologies that will promote equity.
Laura, based on your work developing self-driving cars, does that field hold lessons for robotics?
LM: Solving challenges as complex as self-driving cars takes time. Creating an intelligent system that can coexist on the same streets as human drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians is no small feat. And as roboticists we expect that there will be periods of great progress followed by unexpected roadblocks that take months or years to invent our way around. With any complex system, it’s impossible to predict how the design of each piece will combine into a unified solution.
Julie, how did your academic background mesh with Laura’s private-sector experience during the writing?
JS: This project has been so fulfilling just because of our different perspectives. The book was really born from our early conversations in which we compared notes and uncovered the same gaps in existing technologies and approaches. We were each working in our way, from academe and industry, toward the same direction. This is a book that could not have been written by either of us alone.
