The Rise Of Robots In Our Everyday Lives

Robot love, robot work, “killer robots” – we get the latest on robots moving deeper into life.

Human imagination got so far out front, so fast, on robots that robot reality has been vaguely disappointing for a long time.  Isaac Asimov and "WALL-E" and the Terminator put our real robots to shame.  They still do.  But things are changing.  Sensors and chips and AI and mechanics and “the cloud” are coming together to push robot dreams and reality into new terrain.  There is need – we have aging societies that could use the help.  There is risk – talk of jobs lost to robots and “killer robots.”  And there is reality – they’re moving in.  This hour On Point:  the rise of the robots.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Oliver Morton, briefings editor at The Economist. (@Eaterofsun)

Ken Goldberg, roboticist and professor of industrial engineering and operations research in robotics, automation and new media at the University of California, Berkeley. Author of "The Robot in the Garden." (@ken_goldberg)

Howie Choset, professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute.

Mark Aaron Goldfeder, senior lecturer at Emory University School of Law.

BetaBoston: MIT conference looks at robotics breakthroughs — and big challenges ahead — "Odds are good that no one at yesterday’s 'Computing the Future' symposium at MIT, organized to mark the 50th anniversary of computer science and artificial intelligence research at the school, imagined they’d be watching a black-and-white video clip of Julia Child deftly slicing potatoes. But Matt Mason of Carnegie Mellon University showed it to make a point: technology is still far behind humans when it comes to perceiving and interacting with the world."

Computer World: Why haven't robots yet changed the world? — "A well-known robotics expert acknowledged Wednesday at an MIT symposium that his field has yet to change the world. After Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot, a former MIT robotics professor and co-founder and CTO of Rethink Robotics, first joked that robotics engineers aren't smart enough, he avowed that building autonomous, useful robots is really hard — far more difficult than experts in the field had once anticipated."

The Economist: Immigrants from the future -- "DARPA made robots a priority because, like many others, it suspects that the technology may be on the cusp of scaling far greater heights than a nine-step aluminium ladder. It is expressing its support in the unusual, quasi-sporting, highly public forum of the DRC because robotics is a technology unlike any other. As machines that sense their environment, analyse it and respond accordingly, robots lend themselves to showmanship, judged as they are by their actions in the world."