Robots . . . Robots Who Need People

If I remember the Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated magazines of my youth correctly, by the end of the millennium we are supposed to relax in our easy chairs while robots mow our lawns, wash our windows and vacuum our rugs. It makes sense for a hospital, or a major manufacturer, to pay millions for robots that will make their work more effective, but “no one at home is willing to pay $20,000 for a robot that does a small number of tasks well,” says Jean-Claude Latombe, chairman of the computer sciences department at Stanford University. “The brain is a complex tissue where you have critical tissue that you absolutely don’t want to radiate because you can have very bad side effects, like making the person blind,” Latombe says. A Sacramento firm, Integrated Surgical Systems, has developed a robot called “Robodoc” that bores precision holes in a patient’s thighbone during hip replacement surgery. * “In fact it has been our observation that with just a very few human-like cues from a humanoid robot, people naturally fall into the pattern of interacting with it as if it were a human.” A “disembodied human intelligence,” according to the MIT dogma, won’t suffice, even if it does do windows.