At 9 for every 100 workers, robots are rife in Singapore – so we decided to visit them Robots largely remain the stuff of trepidation and speculation – but in Singapore they've suddenly become very easy to find. As the island nation state emptied out over the holiday season as borders finally reopened for the first time since the pandemic began, I decided to spend the time meeting Singapore's bots rather then …
(ISO) defines a robot as an "actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes, with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks."
How dull?
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as, "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!"
Now we're talking!
I think "robot" is, like "AI", mostly a misnomer or a "marketing embellishment".
Most robots (thinking industrial robots here) are indeed just tools (no pun), and the fact they have a limited decision capacity doesn't change much: Is your thermostat-driven water-heater a robot? No of course, nor are they. They are just sophisticated tools, only able to do one specific task at a time. A welding "robot" is a sophisticated welding machine, period. If there is a fire in their factory floor they won't grab an extinguisher and fight it, not unless extensively reprogrammed and reequipped to do so.
> Narayanan said having 13 machines across eight libraries saves the NLB approximately 3,500 hours of labour a year, covering about 50,000 books overnight.
Assuming these machines only work at night and a night goes from 12am to 8am, this is 104 hours / night, or 37,960 hours per year. And if that's equal to 3,500 human hours, then one hour of robot time is equal to 0.09 hours of human time.
It'd be interesting to know what goes into computing that (are they subtracting maintenance hours from the hours saved?).
Well, perhaps electrosensitives could be trained to read RFID chips. Otherwise those are just part of the problem. Sure, they make it easier to check books in & out, but robots can't yet put books back on shelves. Or help humans find books. Like "Dummie's Guide to LIDAR Hacking". Or help finding texts on speech recognition and copyright law in preparation for passing off "Try Fisting", by J.R.Hartley into an unspecting library system.
This is definitely not my area, but when I hear the term "robot" I think of a unit which is fairly versatile and can carry out a number of tasks. The PV panel cleaning unit is dedicated to that task and I think of that as a machine. The carts moving books and food around strike me more as replacements for conveyor belts, etc. than being in competition with human workers.
"The carts moving books and food around strike me more as replacements for conveyor belts, etc. than being in competition with human workers."
The article did more or less say as much, but that and your comment also lead onto another alternative. Why not just design an efficient kitchen in the first place, possibly with an actual conveyor belt.
The definition of "robot" we use in my STEM department - which has a substantial amount of robotics research - is "something which senses the environment and causes something to change based upon the values sensed", incorporating the three concepts of sense, decide and actuate.. This, of course, rules out the radio-controlled cars of "Robot Wars" but does include mechanical thermostats. Mobile robots are a relatively small sub category.
You mention sense, decide, actuate.
What is your definition of 'decide'? In principle, a bimetallic strip thermostat senses its environment and causes something to change depending upon the values sensed, but I have difficulty in ascribing the action of deciding to a bimetallic strip.
I would suspect that deciding something might imply the possibility of deciding not to do something - looking suspiciously like free will: or at least a 'decision mechanism' that is not amenable to easy analysis - perhaps like Searle's Chinese Room.
I'm not trying to be critical, just intrigued.
Some of these robots are common to see around, depending when you were walking through the place.
I see the author is, thankfully, unfamiliar with the KKH Women and Children’s Hospital. There are at least two robot systems there. One is on rails on the ceiling, scuttling around delivering prescriptions to different counters for staff to dispense, much like a pneumatic tube system except without the tubes.
The other system is quite like the Grab kitchen, where a cart with red warning lights will carry trays and trays of food to the service lift, take the lift up to its desired floor, and then bumble around in the service corridor to await a human to distribute the food. They were so precise in their bumbling that they had worn wheel track marks into the linoleum.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
