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Robots that think: hype, reality, and the next frontier of AI
Leading thoughts from experts in the field. A snapshot of key quotes from our recent Foresight Live event
Bristol Innovations brought together three leading voices in robotics and AI for a frank discussion about where the technology actually stands.
Sabine Hauert, professor of swarm robotics at University of Bristol, Rory Daniels, head of emerging technology and innovation at techUK, and Kevin Driscoll-Lind, CTO at Perceptual Robotics, shared the stage and gave their thoughts on a variety of key topics.
ON HUMANOID ROBOTS
“You’ve got quite unsafe humanoids right now that you wouldn’t trust with your baby. And that’s kind of where we’re at.”
Daniels, techUK
“The step between 90% to 99% to 99.9 to 99.999 in terms of safety and reliability and trust is absolutely huge – and each one is years in the making.”
Daniels, techUK
“The videos look great of a humanoid doing backflips and parkour. But they’re certainly not safe and they’re not commercially deployable anytime soon.”
Daniels, techUK
ON SPECIALISATION VS GENERALISATION
“Specialisation is better than generalisation almost all the time. You might need a generalised robot to connect all the specialised ones, but there are inherent benefits to specialising – and that’s not going to go away.”
Daniels, techUK
“I worry we’re falling into a complexity trap. Your slime mould is beautifully well-suited to what it’s meant to do. Let’s not go for complexity for the sake of it.”
Hauert, University of Bristol
ON THE DEMO-TO-DEPLOYMENT GAP
“Doing a nice demo – it needs to work once well. General, you’re expanding to all these environments where it has to work well, and so suddenly the edge cases really come to bite you.”
Driscoll-Lind, Perceptual Robotics
“All the demos are filmed on beautiful sunny days with no wind.”
Driscoll-Lind, Perceptual Robotics
ON PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE
“If the public don’t accept them, they’re not going to use them. And if anything, they might push back.”
Daniels, techUK
“We’re too shy or scared to engage meaningfully with the communities that will actually – when the rubber hits the road – adopt or otherwise these technologies.”
Daniels, techUK
ON UK GOVERNMENT AND AMBITION
“I don’t see ministers shouting about what’s coming down the line. I don’t see the PM talking about the opportunity in robotics. Leadership in government is not there.”
Daniels, techUK
“We need bigger ambition. We need longer-term thinking. And we need to get serious about the opportunity right now.”
Daniels, techUK
ON WHAT ROBOTS SHOULD ACTUALLY BE
“My hopes are that robots are kind of boring. They’re tools to achieve a thing. When they’re working well, they just work.”
Driscoll-Lind, Perceptual Robotics
“I’d love to see the future where it’s a lot like today for the things that we care about – enabled by a lot of these mundane robots.”
Hauert, University of Bristol
ON EMOTION AND INTELLIGENCE
“We are emotional beings. A robot has to be able to interpret and navigate that world. And you can throw all the GPUs you want in it – but that’s something fundamentally different.”
Daniels, techUK
Marc Ambasna Jones / Working as a technology journalist and writer since 1989, Marc has written for a wide range of titles on technology, business, education, politics and sustainability, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Register, New Statesman, Computer Weekly and many more.
Working as a technology journalist and writer since 1989, Marc has written for a wide range of titles on technology, business, education, politics and sustainability, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Register, New Statesman, Computer Weekly and many more.
