
Robots that act like humans are a waste of time - artsandsci
https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/01/24/robots-that-act-like-humans-are-a-waste-of-time/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29
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carapace
This is an unpopular but important point: Human-like robots are a kind of
fetish.

The first time I saw Sony's dancing robot I thought, "WTF? Make a robot to do
the dishes, _I 'll do the dancing!_ I _like_ to dance."

We're conditioned by fiction to think of cute "droids" as the normal and
inevitable form of robots. I remember how disappointed I was _as a kid_ when I
found out the robots building cars were just arms with tools on the ends, not
"real" humanoid robots. But that lasted only a few moments because _of course_
robots don't need to look like humans! Why would they? Only psychological
impact. Robot dogs and robot people are a kind of fetish.

One corollary of this is that a robot or automated system doesn't need to have
all its sensors attached to its effectors. E.g. self-driving cars can and
should get information from the sensors and computers in the surrounding
traffic infrastructure, etc., and so the "robot" as a system is not confined
to just the car. The "robot" is ambient.

Automation is great. Building _ersatz_ people and then pretending they are
real is nuts. "En vee tee ess, nvts!"

