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  1. Science & Tech
17 October 2013updated 23 Oct 2013 9:26am

If everything’s being automated, let’s hope we’ll like our robots

The robots may be taking our jobs - even making our coffee - but that doesn't mean we'll be fond of them.

By Ian Steadman

How do you make the inevitable robot uprising easier to stomach? Those thinking we were guaranteed a future of flipping burgers and making coffee for each other will be disheartened to hear that coffee company Briggo has managed to solve the latter of those issues with an autonomous kiosk. Christopher Mims at Quarts explains:

Inside, protected by stainless steel walls and a thicket of patents, there is a secret, proprietary viscera of pipes, storage vessels, heating instruments, robot arms and 250 or so sensors that together do everything a human barista would do if only she had something like perfect self-knowledge. “How is my milk steamer performing? Am I a half-degree off in my brewing temperature? Is my water pressure consistent? Is there any residue buildup on my brewing chamber that might require me to switch to a backup system?”

The Briggo coffee kiosk knows how to make a perfect coffee because it was “trained” by an award-winning barista, Patrick Pierce. He’s since left the company, but no matter: as in the techno-utopian Singularity, whose adherents believe that some day we will all upload our brains to computers, once a barista’s essence has been captured by Briggo, his human form is just a legacy system.

That last bit will sound familiar to Star Wars fans – Patrick Pierce is Starbucks’ Jango Fett, and his wood-panelled Yves Behar-designed clones are the stormtrooper clones of high street coffee. It’s not just able to match us, it’s able to match the absolute best of us.

It’s worth reading Mims’ piece in full, as he goes on to explain that Nespresso – that little coffee capsule system – has replaced the coffee machines in many of Europe’s Michelin-starred restaurants. Anyone, with minimal training, can make a consistently top-class coffee using those capsule. Why bother training a barista? And, as the Brisso kiosk shows, why even bother hiring a human to put the capsule into the machine?

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For those who actually enjoy human interaction at places like coffee shops, this is a sad thing. Robots aren’t friends. A designer’s basic job is to make things that humans can and want to use, and that’s going to start meaning “making robots that we want to interact with”.

To whit, here’s a video some researchers at MIT have made demonstrating their idea for a helpful, flying drone that people can call with their smartphones. It’s a bit like a tour guide:

Drones, of course, have a terrible reputation, because for every one that is put to good use delivering burritos, there are ones being used to bomb people without warning in places like Pakistan and Yemen. As Dezeen tells it:

Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, research and development lead at Senseable City Lab, said SkyCall was designed to counter the sinister reputation of drones, and show they can be useful. “Our imaginations of flying sentient vehicles are filled with dystopian notions of surveillance and control, but this technology should be tasked with optimism,” he told Dezeen.

That optimism comes in the form of a friendly, female – but still distinctly robotic – voice. It’s like something from a computer game. Is it particularly reassuring? Not massively. It doesn’t give off that trustworthy vibe you’d get from another human, or even a paper map.

Trustworthiness is a theme that’s been explored in science fiction for years and years, of course, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Will Smith’s I, Robot, so it’s not surprising to see designers begin to tackle it. You also get the idea of the “uncanny valley” thrown around – if you plot a graph of “human likeness” on the x-axis of a graph and “how real it looks to people” on the y-axis, you get a steady correlation that collapses (into a “valley” shape”) just before it reaches actual human likeness. That is, the objects that creep us out the most are the things that look closest to human as possible while just falling short. It’s all a way of saying that creating things that look like humans, for situations where we expect humans, is tricky.

Studies that have looked at what kind of human-likeness we want in our robots have given rise to some surprising results. Akanksha Prakash from Georgia Tech carried out one such study, and its results (published earlier this month) show that, often, participants don’t actually want to be helped by human-like robots. The more delicate the task – like having help in the bath – the more divisive the opinions on whether something human-like is better.

There’s also a generational divide, with younger people not minding things that look like human-robot hybrids around the house, whereas older people prefer the straightforwardly human. There are clearly a lot of psychological factors at work that are going to prove a challenge to designers hoping that their product – whatever it is – becomes a hit.

Perhaps when the robots arrive they’ll still have some human-like features, in the same way that some smartphones still use yellow, lined paper to give people a clue that the app they’ve opened is for making notes – or like wood-panelling on the side of an autonomous coffee kiosk.

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