Part 7: I, Robot
The final session of the second day featured Rodney Brooks, an MIT professor specializing in artificial intelligence's application in robotics, and the chairman and CTO of the consumer-robot company iRobot (a pun on Isaac Asimov's famous "I, Robot," story).

Brooks ran through a number of developments and styles of robots, noting that in the past, there were plenty of wrong assumptions of how robots would be used in the home. But the convergence of robotics and AI research, as well as wireless and Internet-connected devices, should make certain applications of consumer robotics widely available.

He defined a robot as something that contains at least one sensor and one actuator with processing power connecting the two. He cited a list of current consumer robots, including Lego Mindstorms, Furby, "My Real Baby" (which he demonstrated and could not get back to sleep), various pets, robotic lawn mowers, and a few home cleaning robots.

He showed aspects of iRobot's prototype product, which is a small device with an arm, camera, microphone, speaker, and motors that can cantilever and rotate the camera into various positions. He mentioned that iRobot would be perfect to answer a utility house call, opening the door and allowing a user to remotely interact over the Internet with a repairperson.

In the lab, Brooks said, they were testing social interaction through a bodiless robot called Kismet that could produce and respond to a variety of body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice. He showed several video clips showing "naive" (untrained) volunteers who tested and taught the robot, and the remarkable verisimilitude with which it responded. He made it clear that this wasn't AI: the robot was using conditioned and programmed responses. But the behavior was convincing, nonetheless.

The debate over whether robots would want to take over devolves to us versus them. But, Brooks said, in the near future it might be "us as them," with more aspects of robotics being embedded into bodies through implants (cochlear, retinal, etc.) that enhance or repair physical systems.

The fact that this appears "yucky" to us today may change tomorrow, he said. (The "yucky" argument came up several times during the conference as a shorthand for things we find beyond the pale today.) He said that in Japan, organ transplant is considered unacceptable, but the mood is changing. He noted that a few years ago, body piercings, even earrings, were "yucky" in Japan, but now most teenage girls have them.