Automation, Not Autonomy

Aaron Ames leads a humanoid robotics lab at Caltech and clearly loves the machines. On PBS NewsHour's Horizons he still spends most of the episode explaining why they are not ready for anyone's home. Today's robots, he says, are very good at playing back motions people taught them. That is "automation, but not autonomy." A lab task that works 50 to 80 percent of the time is a demo. A home needs something closer to 99.9 percent, and then it has to work with light bulbs and coffee pots nobody trained it on.

His fear is not a Terminator. It is a robot put somewhere it should not be yet. He wakes up "hoping I don't have a bunch of text messages from people saying that a robot hurt someone."

When host William Brangham lists what people want from a home robot, he says "taking care of old people." Later he adds, "who knows how my mother might move." That one line is the whole problem. Before a family asks what a home robot can do, the better question is what it is guaranteed never to do. We will keep asking.