"Robot" Is a Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not a Robot

bartvk

I strongly advise the podcast "Robot Or Not". The hosts have very strong opinions on what exactly constitutes a robot, and readers write in with edge cases. It's been going on for a long time, so nowadays they also categorize other things. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/robot-or-not/id9979302... https://open.spotify.com/show/4M2AELzmQy77FxaYZMl6e9 https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/robot-or-not/b911efc0-e2f6-0...

walrus01

The Crushinator might disagree if the premise is that an appliance/machine shaped thing can't be a robot. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=futurama+...

michaelt

I once had a robotics professor who argued any definition of 'robot' broad enough to include roombas and self-driving cars and industrial robot arms (even if made narrow enough to exclude remote-control toy cars, cars with cruise control, CNC mills and washing machines) would inevitably define cruise missiles as robots. Meaning the world had 'killer robots' before we had digital computers. Instead, he argued the definition of a robot is "I know it when I see it"

vincnetas

Robot etymology is from Czech robota, robotník, robotiti. To work, worker, to do work. I especially like "road works" signs in Poland saying "uwaga roboty drogowe" and translate/visualise it in my mind like "Danger robots on the road"

singularity2001

the common distinction between robot and machine is that machines are mostly stationary and don't move by themselves. (Self-driving cars sit in between, depending on further developments, they might slide into the bot category.)

stymaar

Same for “drones”: a cruise missile is as much of a drone as a Shahed 136, and remote-controlled boats or planes are also technically drones.

TacticalCoder

Roomba and the likes are definitely robots. The advanced ones have cameras, map your floor, vaccuum clean, water clean, etc. You can contact them remotely (a friend uses her cleaning robot to spy on her husband while he's at home!) and give them orders. Nobody ever said "robot" meant "machines with AGI thinking": robot, literally as defined by the person mentioned in TFA and who coined the term, meant "to work" / "forced labor". Work/labor that could be done by servants. If cleaning my entire apartment by vaccuum cleaning, water cleaning, giving me reports about it, obeying my orders (e.g. if I tell to stop) ain't "automated labor that could have been done by a servant", I don't know what is.

michaelbuckbee

"The utility of a robot is inversely proportional to how much it looks like a robot." -- Buckbee's law.

AnonymousPlanet

But your ordinary traffic light might be called a "robot" by social norm. At least if you live in South Africa.

mauvehaus

A food processor and stand mixer are robots in French[0]. I suppose this rather supports the claim that "robot" is a social construct as different societies have constructed it differently. N.b. I haven't taken a French class in almost 30 years. Please excuse any nuances in the French use of "robot" in this context that I may have missed. ETA: I almost forgot! Our nearby hardware store has a robot that sharpens kitchen knives. It's much less impressive than that sounds, both in appearance and how well it actually sharpens a knife. Nevertheless, I did note to the person operating it that if the robot uprising comes, we may regret the choice to simply give the robots knives. [0] https://www.boulanger.com/c/robot

wavemode

There's an old saying, "if it works it's not AI". We could make a similar statement: "if it works, it's not robotics". That is, once a robot becomes reliable and efficient enough for everyday use, we no longer consider it a robot we just consider it a machine or tool.

throwthrowuknow

Dropping the “universal” was a mistake. Even a robotic arm that just performs one task isn’t really a robot, it’s just a more capable CNC machine in a different form factor.

dvh

The difference between machine and robot is that machine perform useful work.

bitwize

Indeed. "Robot" is a radial category that includes machines that resemble humans in either appearance or the sophistication of tasks they can perform. It's one if those terms like "fruit" that doesn't have a strict technical definition. A robotic arm is described as robotic because of its resemblance to a human arm. If you put human-like limbs on, say, a tank (as in Metal Gear, or Tomy's Battle Skipper line of toys from the 90s), the tank becomes more "robotic" as a result. A self-driving truck is considered a robot because its operation incorporates planning, navigation, following of rules including traffic laws, and responding to stimuli such as traffic and people/animals in the road, all undertaken autonomously and resembling the kinds of decisions a human must make when driving a vehicle. Oh! TFA is written by Mikell Taylor. I worked with her once, yonks ago.

monitron

One time I was messing around with the settings for a 3D printer in whatever software I was using to control it, and found a dropdown for "Machine type" or similar that defined my printer as a "3-axis robot." That gave me pause. Is it a robot? Maybe. That printer didn't even have any sensors, apart from the thermistors that fed into the temperature control PID loops. But by someone's definition, it's a robot. That was and remains fun to think about. I guess that like the author, I will "be pedantic all day long."