Book - Chapter 12

Question 1

Robots used to Tackle Boredom and Loneliness

Answer 1

If AI and robots are developed to the point where they can reliably imitate human interaction patterns, they could be extremely helpful in relieving feelings of boredom and loneliness;

Question 2

Reason for Lack of Progress in HRI

Answer 2

a lack of progress in autonomous control and AI rather than robotic hardware

humans can currently hold a meaningful interaction through a robot but because machine learning requires vast amounts of annotated data and computational time, it comes to its own in domains that allow offline learning and for which huge amounts of training data are available or can be generated

as opposed to machine learning of the game of chess, where the learning can run as fast as computers will allow, machine learning of HRI strategies inherently runs online

no matter how fast the computer is, the interaction pace is dictated by the human interaction partner, and the evaluation and updaters of the machine learning will run in human time rather than in computer time

pooling interaction events could be a solution to the scarcity of HRI data and could speed up the evaluation of learned interaction strategies

Question 3

Crystal Ball Problems

Answer 3

Currently, it is nearly impossible to gain consensus on the far future of HRI, and even on small and concrete predictions of how long it will take to develop a specific capability or what we actually want from a robot

Question 4

Historic Predictions

Answer 4

In the 1950s, when the fundamentals of AI were first developed, it was expected that strong AI could be designed within the upcoming decade