Daily Life as a Robotics Student

Claire is a current undergraduate student studying robotics, with two parents and a younger brother, who is currently in secondary school. Her mother works as an administrator at a university, and her dad is a lecturer. She has a fair amount of experience with technology due to her studies, where she works with developing hardware. In her personal life she also plays a lot of games which utilize AI, such as simulation games, where the game must adapt to her actions when controlling all other aspects.

Passion for Developing Robots to Alleviate Loneliness

In 2050, leading on from her degree, she hopes she can perhaps develop robots either for entertainment or to keep people company, such as robot pets. She hopes these can help combat topics such as loneliness and help improve mental health, and contribute to her dream for the future, where the world is a better place with more resources for support, more homes, etc. She envisions a lot of changes occurring in the next 30 years with respect to how much has changed in the last 10, and hopes it would be for the better, with robots helping with healthcare and other such areas. With regards to employment, she hopes that robots will tend to take jobs that may be dangerous for humans, with our safety taking priority in the workforce, so robots would work in areas such as space exploration, construction, etc.

“Baymax” and Robot Design

She imagines robots to be designed with little quirks to give them some more personality, referencing Big Hero 6, where they can say little comments to improve someone’s day. She wouldn’t want the robots to have a lot of freedom, and believes we are nowhere near advanced enough to develop fully sentient AI since everything would need to be scripted to begin with but would like robots to have a bit of personality and variety in how they act. Of course, this wouldn’t obstruct their usefulness, but it would contribute to their interactions with people, such as to make us laugh. However, even though she doesn’t think robots can think for themselves, she thinks that we could communicate with them better in the future: when Cleverbot first came out she thought she was talking to a real person because of how it copied human speech, and so she believes there will be a more advanced form in the future, so we could perhaps have conversations with robots.

Potential of Robots for Housework and Caregiving

In the future, robots will be able to complete a variety of tasks in different areas, according to her. They could complete housework, which would free up time for people and therefore take away a source of stress, as well as allowing for more free time for them to do what they enjoy. Building off of that, it would also be good when it comes to helping elderly and disabled people, especially people who have issues with movement, since it could safe a lot of pain and exhaustion. However, she has mixed feelings on if robots could look after children, since they would take away from family time and connections and may not be able to adapt a child’s reactions, but in other areas may be more trustworthy than a person would, such as perhaps giving them medicine. Overall, she believes it strongly depends on the task in question.

AI in Education and Healthcare

Outside of the home, she believes that technology can be used to help with a large amount of roles. In the school setting, she said that AI programs could be used to analyse areas each individual student struggles or excels in, perhaps going as far as assigning different questions in tests and homework to adapt to each student’s needs. People would still be needed, since she’s not sure an AI could teach a classroom, especially with how much they would need to simplify concepts to each class. In medicine, she would trust robots to do surgeries, since they would be a lot more precise in the procedure, but due to online quizzes for diagnoses often being unreliable, she thinks that if we have to assign AI to diagnose patients, then we need to introduce some sort of scale and limits to what a robot would suggest: for example, the robot may insist someone has a terminal illness over something small, like a headache. Overall, with regards to the general workforce, she is worried about people losing jobs due to robots being in demand instead and imagines that people will be more interested in creative jobs since there’s less of a risk of them being replaced. Overall, her main concern is that people won’t be able to make money to live a comfortable life, since that is all she feels work is useful for.

Concerns About Safety

Other than when it comes to jobs, she believes technology will change a lot of society. For example, self-driving cars, where she is unsure about how cars will prioritise actions to take if an accident occurs, whether they would do what it takes to protect the passengers inside or do what is needed to protect others. The only way she would be sure that it would be safe, would be if everyone had a self-driving car and they would travel at the same speed and distance from all other cars, which she compares to be similar to a cable car. With surveillance, she believes that it would be unreliable to use AI to take note of crime, since they could misinterpret things, and she’s worried about who would have access to data that may be collected, insisting it stays only with the AI and is not distributed to anyone. Robots will also be able to help with languages, such as when you visit another country, they could recite information in whatever language you selected, and to the level you’d understand. Finally, she sees how robots could help with the environment, but due to the power required for them to run and the materials needed to make one, she believes it would be counter-productive, as it would create more waste.

Technology Education and Expectations for Social Innovation

Due to her studies, she believes that her interpretation of AI and robots is different to that of the general public. She feels like most people would see AI as a humanoid machine and robot as something else, due to how movies demonstrate what an AI is. However, she says that AI is the code something executes where it needs to decide something based on some form of external input, and a robot is a machine designed for a purpose. In addition to her studies, she also enjoys media involving technology, such as Isaac Asimov’s books and iRobot. Overall, she has a positive outlook on the future of technology, where she is excited for the advancements made that can help society as a whole. She believes that, in order to keep up with the advancement in technology, children should be given the opportunity to study such topics in school so that they can grow accustomed to the changes and won’t feel as uncomfortable using such technology. Even after this, adults should be given ‘refresher sessions’ which would help familiarise them with the changes, so they don’t feel left behind as society progresses forwards.