Robots and Artificial Intelligence We started to develop primitive ways of assisting humans with artificial intelligence a few years ago and then in a much bigger way. Thus, the proliferation of all those devices like the Echo device, Siri and others. As we all know these devices are voice controlled for the most part, with a few exceptions such as when door bell cameras are connected to them. They are helpful in some ways but far from perfect. I have a couple of Echo devices and find they are great for spelling in a pinch, but sometimes I have to repeat the commands several times before they work and even then, there are times when there is an error and I have to start again. One of the most annoying things with the Echo is the delay between the doorbell camera and the device. When someone rings the bell and you ask Echo to show the front door, it seems like it takes forever, and there are times when you are told front door is not available. Waiting for the front door camera can cause those who ring the bell to leave before you can see who was there. The entire purpose of the doorbell camera is to see who is at the door before you open it. We haven’t reached that stage yet. When I tried to look up the reason the first site I went to blamed me. It said the reasons are usually poor Wi-Fi signal strength or slow internet. I have neither of these problems. It turns out the lagging is a major concern of many of the owners of this setup. Things will no doubt get better has time marches on. What is in our future with personal helpers? We already see some of this in business and as with the Echo device there is improvement needed. I am talking about the virtual assistants. The way they are structured can be very annoying. Many sites on the internet are using them now and they seem to limit the reasons you can get help. You should be allowed to directly type in the problem you are having and not have to try and classify it first. The AI should have to figure out where to send the question or complaint to. The same is true for those annoying AI phone connections. When it comes to AI or artificial intelligence, I believe the car companies have the best AI devices right now. While some criticize the AI driving the cars, even though they are not perfect, they are so much safer than human drivers that we can’t even compare them to humans. The problems I have are mainly due to some of the updates to my navigation. Like most people today I have a navigation screen and software which came with the car. The car is three years old and a navigation update was sent to the car. I would like to say the navigation software was great and was picked by some automotive magazines as the best. As I said that was before the update. I accepted the update thinking it was only going to update addresses, but boy was I wrong. It changed much of the format for the worst. The first thing I noticed was the voice control shuts off when you get several blocks away from your target. Another thing was it was hard to find where to put in an address to go to and I couldn’t figure out how to save it. Points of interest used to be great with a list to choose from that contained every possible category. That is gone and you get one line to enter something on. It took me a while to realize you could enter a category into it because there was no instructions. This is one thing I really detest and that is changing something just to change it, especially when it was fine the way it was. As we move into more advanced AI helpers some advances are being made with robotic ones. One advancement which scientists are working on is getting a robot to realize when a human needs help. One college has said their robotic program is working on a method for robots to recognize social cues given by humans that they need help. Before I go any further, I believe it is important to note we don’t want our future robot assistants interfering in our lives when they don’t have to, so it will be important to be very careful how the robots are programmed. You wouldn’t want your robot to call the police or a hospital while you were asleep because it thinks you are dying. Let’s face it, if things keep going the way they are, we will all have robot assistants in the future. Look how fast cell phones took off. Will our robotic assistants be big hulking metal beasts as shown in some of the science fiction movies? I think we can forget about that. First of all, they will have to be safe. This means they can’t be too strong. You wouldn’t want them to be breaking things with a high pressure grip or breaking someone’s arm or leg while trying to assist them. They will have to be made of a non-threatening material, maybe a soft rubber or skin like material at least on the outside. Another thing to be considered is how they are powered. They should be programmed to let the owner know when they have to be repowered so he or she isn’t interrupted in the middle of something and they should be able to travel to a recharging station in the home. While it isn’t really necessary, they might be better off looking as human as possible or not, depending on how the owner feels about that. They could also be programmed to protect the owner if a crime is being committed against them. One thing they have to be programmed for however is never to take a human life, by any act or omission of an act. More than likely they will be programmed with Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics which state:
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