What do you think?
Rate this book
How to Grow a Robot: Developing Human-Friendly, Social AI
How to develop robots that will be more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed.
Most robots are not very friendly. They vacuum the rug, mow the lawn, dispose of bombs, even perform surgery--but they aren't good conversationalists. It's difficult to make eye contact. If the future promises more human-robot collaboration in both work and play, wouldn't it be better if the robots were less mechanical and more social? In How to Grow a Robot, Mark Lee explores how robots can be more human-like, friendly, and engaging.
Developments in artificial intelligence--notably Deep Learning--are widely seen as the foundation on which our robot future will be built. These advances have already brought us self-driving cars and chess match-winning algorithms. But, Lee writes, we need robots that are perceptive, animated, and responsive--more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed. The way to achieve this, he argues, is to "grow" a robot so that it learns from experience--just as infants do.
After describing "what's wrong with artificial intelligence" (one key shortcoming: it's not embodied), Lee presents a different approach to building human-like robots: developmental robotics, inspired by developmental psychology and its accounts of early infant behavior. He describes his own experiments with the iCub humanoid robot and its development from newborn helplessness to ability levels equal to a nine-month-old, explaining how the iCub learns from its own experiences. AI robots are designed to know humans as objects; developmental robots will learn empathy. Developmental robots, with an internal model of "self," will be better interactive partners with humans. That is the kind of future technology we should work toward.
Most robots are not very friendly. They vacuum the rug, mow the lawn, dispose of bombs, even perform surgery--but they aren't good conversationalists. It's difficult to make eye contact. If the future promises more human-robot collaboration in both work and play, wouldn't it be better if the robots were less mechanical and more social? In How to Grow a Robot, Mark Lee explores how robots can be more human-like, friendly, and engaging.
Developments in artificial intelligence--notably Deep Learning--are widely seen as the foundation on which our robot future will be built. These advances have already brought us self-driving cars and chess match-winning algorithms. But, Lee writes, we need robots that are perceptive, animated, and responsive--more like humans and less like computers, more social than machine-like, and more playful and less programmed. The way to achieve this, he argues, is to "grow" a robot so that it learns from experience--just as infants do.
After describing "what's wrong with artificial intelligence" (one key shortcoming: it's not embodied), Lee presents a different approach to building human-like robots: developmental robotics, inspired by developmental psychology and its accounts of early infant behavior. He describes his own experiments with the iCub humanoid robot and its development from newborn helplessness to ability levels equal to a nine-month-old, explaining how the iCub learns from its own experiences. AI robots are designed to know humans as objects; developmental robots will learn empathy. Developmental robots, with an internal model of "self," will be better interactive partners with humans. That is the kind of future technology we should work toward.
- GenresNonfiction
384 pages, Hardcover
Published April 28, 2020
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 7, 2022
This is a really great book about AI and robotics, quite easy to read and comprehend, though with enough depth and references.
It starts with history and current developments, explains well success and problems of the modern approach to AI, clearly describes issues in the pathway to the general AI and new alternative - developmental robotics, which I find absolutely reasonaable.
The last part of the book is more about future and possible ways to develop AI and robotics. Everything is again quite reasonable, plausible and easy to comprehend.
Highly recommended!
It starts with history and current developments, explains well success and problems of the modern approach to AI, clearly describes issues in the pathway to the general AI and new alternative - developmental robotics, which I find absolutely reasonaable.
The last part of the book is more about future and possible ways to develop AI and robotics. Everything is again quite reasonable, plausible and easy to comprehend.
Highly recommended!
June 12, 2023
This was an interesting book about developmental robotics and AI, and was an enjoyable read. I did learn quite a bit about these fields, and even gained some knowledge of models such as ANNs. However, the majority of the book wasn't actually about how to develop such robots, going on about the history of robotics instead. A quite large part of the remainder of the book was also speculation from the future, so there is a lot to read through if you want to get to the part where it discusses development of social robots and AGI/AHI.
June 6, 2022
Definitely interesting, but dense and a bit hard to get through.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews