Why Do We Need Human Shaped Robots?
As everyone is likely aware by now, Space Karen’s robot demonstration was largely faked. The robots were actually controlled by human beings off stage. We are not now, and likely will not be for some significant time, in a position to create general purpose housebots.
But do we need to?
Today, I can buy a robot that will clean my floors. I can buy a robot that will mow my lawn. I can buy a robot that will cook my meals. I can buy a robot that will clean my dishes. I am sure that I am missing some, and some of these are still industrial scale expensive as opposed to household scale expensive. But a wide range of home tasks can, or will in the near future, be able to be done by robots. It is just that the robots do not look like humans, and so, for some people, that does not seem to count.
Why not?
The idea might be that you can buy one robot that will do everything for you. However, as the article linked above points out, such robots will be incredibly difficult to train. You essentially need to teach a robot common sense, something none of our AI systems are close to producing. And even then, there would be no guarantee that such an all-purpose robot would be cheaper than single use robots that do not have a human form.
Perhaps the concern is that for some uses a human-lie robot would be more acceptable. Nursing, bartending, waiters — areas where people expect to see a human being might be areas where a human-like robot would be more acceptable. Except, again, even if Space Karen’s robots were not controlled by humans off-stage, they don’t really look like people, and they likely won’t for some significant time. Making an ambulatory wax-doll with human like expressions appears to be really, really difficult. Your robot bartender is going to look like a robot for the foreseeable future, even if one can ever be made.
Those are potentially reasonable, if unlikely to be realized, justifications for wanting a human shaped robot. But I am afraid that the desire comes from a darker place, at least for some people. I think that some people just want servants. They want something that reminds them that they are at the top of the heap and others have to do what they tell them to do. It is no fun ordering around a little dish that your cat already dominates. Ordering around a person is the best, but maybe ordering around something that looks like a person is a close second. Maybe even better, since its just a robot and there are no social niceties that need to be observed.
I don’t know. Maybe I am being too cynical. But it does strike me as odd that a man who is all in on Amercian Fascism is desperately trying to convince us that human robots are the way of the future. If it were just a money play, then Musk’s company could very well have introduced task specific task robots for much cheaper than the amount they have likely spent on trying to fool people into believing that human shaped robots are just around the corner. Given human history and Musk’s embrace of white nationalism, I cannot help but think that at least some of the drive to human like robots is based in an ugly desire to have “people” under your complete control.
Robots can be good. I cannot find who said it first, but this is absolutely true: I do not want AI that writes books for me. I want AI that cleans my house, so I have time to write books. Household robots can be a step towards that future. But the future of those robots is almost certainly not anthropomorphic robots. It is instead purpose specific tools. The desire to ignore that simple fact is more than a little concerning given what it might say about the mindset of the people pushing for human-shaped robots.