What to know about real robots deployed in the real world

"If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then the people who have built and sold the robot have failed."

I understand the point, but there are already many electronic devices (robots?) ostensibly made to help me including my vehicle that sometimes need to be "strangled to death" in order to reboot and fix whatever issue was plaguing it. I say strangled to death because typically power buttons are software controlled and don't respond to just a quick press. My response? A shrug because it's very common. Why would people respond to a failing "robot" in another way? I get if it's caring for your grandmother but vacuuming your carpet?

I've had to hit the "kill switch" on my:

TV/iPad/iPhone/PC, ancient clothes washing machine, modern dishwasher, router/modem, TV etc.

My first law of robotics in production environments:

1. In order to effectively deploy real robots to solve real problems, you have to foresee and fix any problem that may occur in 99.5% of scenarios. As automation is added in series, the higher that number must be to remain economically effective.

My second law of robotics:

2. Robots depreciate, which has tax advantages. Human wages do not.

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Discussion:

A realistic scenario is an assembly plant that makes 1,000 widgets per day. Imagine cars, washing machines, etc.

Your widget plant has 10 footprints. Any robot stoppage takes at least 5 minutes to clear.

With a 99.5% success rate and one robot, you lose 25 minutes a day (1000*0.005 = 5 stoppages ) * 5 minutes.

If all 10 footprints have robots with a 99.5% success rate, you lose 250 minutes a day (naive model!). That's over 4 hours.

In reality, each station would have manual bypass procedures, or you would go bankrupt.

After having seen the rise and fall of a number of "robot to make your pizza", "robot fry cook", etc. startups, I've been pitching a new rule that:

There is an inverse correlation between how much a robot looks like a _robot_ and how useful it is in the real world.

Earlier today we got the "Taco Bell Distinguished Professor", now here is the "Panasonic Professor Emeritus of Robotics" (at MIT no less).

When did academia stop to even pretend it was independent of commercial interests?

The present and future of human-robot interactions is being implemented and iterated on in Ukraine, at a pace nobody has seen in technology development since WWII

Those lessons, CONOPS and technology developments are coming to the civilian world sooner than you think

Kill switches are the least of your problems

What could be the main cause for things being so hard to cross over from simulation to reality?

Should we invest some more in stochastic programming to handle all the little quirks that cannot be modeled perfectly?

Or is the major issue that robots must work together with humans, which are already pretty complex from a biological perspective, let alone from a sociological or historical one.

The author ends with the thought that a robot that has a stop button is a failure but his most famous product for consumers, Roomba, has such a button. Does he talk elsewhere about this?

He makes a paragraph about robots that interfere with ordinary people as bad and references autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. He has a whole series starting here https://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-i/ or with no comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971352

In a different HN thread, I was talking about "permatech". This was a term that some friends and I were exploring as a generalization of permacomputing. However, we had yet to come up with anything coherent.

Rodney Brook's articulation of these laws of robotics is the first thing I have come across that seems to point the way to formulating something for permatech. That is, if we generalize "robots" to any kind of automation that may have to interface with humans.

The first principle, that the form of automation makes a promise to humans, reminds me a lot of both Christopher Alexander's ideas on architecture, as well as Mark Burgess's Promise Theory. Alexander has a lot of ideas on design that goes beyond buildings, and is very influential to the Human-Computer Interface design and OOP. Burgess's ideas speaks a lot about how systems of agents (both human and machine) can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate together.

The second principle about agency connects to a lot of things. Among them, I can draw connection to the Living Systems world view, in contrast to the Machine World view. The former retains meaning and purpose for humans, and the latter can be summed up as "beat to fit and paint to match".

The third principle struck me as practical yet narrow in scope. On a second pass, I think there's something more general that can be teased out of it. I'm not exactly sure what it is. In some ways, it reminds me of how software can be improved iteratively, or what Alexander had wrote about "unfolding", where designs can change to suit inhabitants of a building.

>>Most robots require kill buttons or estops on them so that a human can shut them down. If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then the people who have built and sold the robot have failed. They have not made it operate well enough that the robot never gets into a state where things are going that wrong.

A corollary of this is the robot that gets it's kill switch activated should also notify it's designers of the failure and details (upon rebooting, not first waiting to shut down), or provide a report that the customer can send. These should be top priority repair/upgrade tickets to improve it's function in the real world.

I recently played the game Detroit: Become Human. The game pushed me to think about many things. I wonder if I will live to see those times? Will such times even come?

When going through a cynical phase I tend to think the only person that has thought clearly about this was Tilden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics#Tilden's_laws

- A robot must protect its existence at all costs.

- A robot must obtain and maintain access to its own power source.

- A robot must continually search for better power sources

The key problem other robot laws have is the resulting robots would be such pushovers as to be useless, a point Rodney Brooks also makes quite a lot.

More like "Three Laws of Robotics businesses / engineers" -- none of these laws is particularly relevant to the robots themselves...

I’ve seen Waymo vehicles clear intersections, pull over, and stop when they detect a fire truck’s blaring horn, not just the siren.

> Some of the vehicles were notorious for blocking intersections

Letting self-proclaimed autonomous vehicles use public roads was so idiotic that you need a new word coined for those who didn't see it immediately.