Watching Murata the Robot Biker made me realise how tricky it is to master bike riding. Ryan is getting more confident, but he still struggles with unexpected situations. All this has been learned through trial and error and more than a few spills and frustrations. He is definitely having more fun than the robot now, although the robot won't have received any skinned knees in his learning process.
If the Japanese bureaucracy get their way, Murata will not be exposed to the rough and tumble of learning to ride. He will have to be proficient from day one. And he will have to document when he causes harm to his human masters.
From The Times
When the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov envisioned a future shared by human beings and robots, he predicted that the mechanical servants of tomorrow would be safely controlled by only three simple laws.
But when Japan’s notoriously zealous bureaucracy looks into the future, it sees robots enmeshed in miles of red tape.
Three laws, the robotics experts say, are nowhere near sufficient to ensure human safety in a world where cleaning, carrying and even cooking could one day be performed by machines. So the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has drafted a hugely complex set of proposals for keeping robots in check.
It is symptomatic of the increasingly complex and risk averse world that we live in today. The risks that our parents took with us as children are significantly higher than those that this generation are willing to take with our children. We monitor car safety, food safety, personal safety, play safety and many many other aspects of their lives that I don't even remember being discussed in my childhood. I wonder how that will impact our children's independence and creativity later in life. Will they be totally risk averse, or will it make them more confident, not having been exposed to some of the bad stuff.
For the interested, here are twenty more things that you really didn't need to know about robots.
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