Williams Feb. 6

Transcription 

Henrik Christensen: Director of the Robotic and Intellignet Machines Center at Georgia Tech 

Robotic was first introduced in our society about 1962. And they were introduced inttially for handling heavy objects in the automotive industry

So the first robots were really big. Sometimes they were clumsy and then we were really using them to do dirty and dull jobs. Jobs people should not be doing.

Over some of the last 50 years we have really seen a tremendous evolution in robots. So today you can get much more agile robots, and also now we have mobile robots that can move around.

The old robots were really fully preprogrammed so they were very dumb, in terms of they would do whatever with no intelligence. Now we have robots that have a very high degree of intelligence

So we see robots that are being used in manufacturing, then we see robots that are being used in health care applications. So health care for instance can be surgical robots, it could help people in their homes. Then we have service robots, for instance delivering packages, autonomous lawnmowers, autonomous driving cars. Then we have defense robots, which is flying robots and ground robots helping people. And then finally we have space robots.

So when you talk about the most popular robots, then you can in manufacturing its still doing welding and painting jobs in automotives. If you look at the home area it’s the vacuum cleaner. If you look at medical its surgical robots that can do surgery on people.

A lot of the jobs that were physically very demanding have been replaced by jobs that have better job quality. So as far as very heavy lifting that would sort of ruin people shoulder and elbows have been replaced by jobs with robot programmers. So we really moved from dumb jobs to intelligent jobs in manufacturing.

So at home I have two robots that clean my floor so I don’t do floor cleaning anymore

If you look at medical these robots that we have can do what we call minimal invasive surgery, which allow you to do much better surgery and much faster. So today you can go in and have heart surgery and be released the next day.

Almost all of the really dull and dirty jobs will get replaced. We will get robots to do the things that we don’t want to do. I expect that as we grow older we see a lot of people that want to live in their homes and we can provide robots that will allow them.

So I’m saying by the time I retire I will have a robot that will me assist to get out of bed, get dressed, take a shower, go to the restroom and prepare a meal. And  things like going to the restroom is something I would like to not have to rely on other people to be able to do that.

As you grow older you might have a hard time moving, you might be physically disabled and the robots can help you do this.

The predictation is that children that are born today will never have to learn to drive a car. 16 years from now we will have autonomously driving cars. It will take you from A to B, and you can just get in the car and say I really need to go to the Cinema, Target or wherever you need to go and it will take you there.

In my mind I have no doubt its going to be a good thing, of course your talking to a roboticist. I think there is a lot of things people should not be doing today. So as an example we should never have people going up and dismantling a bomb. We should send an robot (and) if we have an accident then its not a big deal. Same thing for firefighters, they should not have to go into a blaze.

I have parents that are growing old. They have hard time driving their car. By getting autonomously driving cars they can continue to have an active lifestyle, but they no longer are required to drive.

I don’t think we will program (robots) at all as we do today. So it will be just like we train children we will train robots in the same way. So we teach them to do particular things by showing them. If I want them to be able to prepare a meal for me I can show how to prepare a meal and it will know how to prepare a meal in the future. If I’m going to try to assemble a car I will show it how to assemble a car and now its your turn.