Our Robots, Ourselves

“[An] essential book… it is required reading as we seriously engage one of the most important debates of our time.”-- Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age From drones to Mars rovers--an exploration of the most innovative use of robots today and a provocative argument for the crucial role of humans in our increasingly technological future. In Our Robots, Ourselves, David Mindell offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of robotics today, debunking commonly held myths and exploring the rapidly changing relationships between humans and machines. Drawing on firsthand experience, extensive interviews, and the latest research from MIT and elsewhere, Mindell takes us to extreme environments--high atmosphere, deep ocean, and outer space--to reveal where the most advanced robotics already exist. In these environments, scientists use robots to discover new information about ancient civilizations, to map some of the world’s largest geological features, and even to “commute” to Mars to conduct daily experiments. But these tools of air, sea, and space also forecast the dangers, ethical quandaries, and unintended consequences of a future in which robotics and automation suffuse our everyday lives. Mindell argues that the stark lines we’ve drawn between human and not human, manual and automated, aren’t helpful for understanding our relationship with robotics. Brilliantly researched and accessibly written, Our Robots, Ourselves clarifies misconceptions about the autonomous robot, offering instead a hopeful message about what he calls “rich human presence” at the center of the technological landscape we are now creating.

"Mindell brings an altogether refreshing perspective to a field that can sometimes get lost in the ‘what if’.”—*Financial Times *

"Neither overly optimistic nor doomy, MIT professor Mindell offers a clear-eyed, reasoned overview of current and potential robotics achievements—and why the machines will always need us."—Discover 

"Science fiction has become science as we find more and more uses for robots. The MIT professor explores the 'hidden world' of robotics and the controversial relationship between humankind and what it has created."—***The Sacramento Bee
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“Mindell’s ingenious and profoundly original book will enlighten those who prophesy that robots will soon make us redundant, and challenges us all to think more precisely and creatively about how machines can augment human potential.”—**David Autor, Professor of Economics, MIT

"Authoritative.... [Mindell] leaves us with a better understanding of what lies ahead for our daily lives."—Kirkus 

"An expansively researched and enjoyably accessible treatment of robotic automation, recommended for readers of popular science and those with an interest in artificial intelligence and automation."—Library Journal

"A careful, measured extrapolation of contemporary technological trends."—Booklist

“A lucid, hype-free exploration of how robotic automation really works—in concert with human design, intention, and action.”—Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing Professor, Scheller School of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology
 
“My thanks to the author for bringing scholarship and sanity to a debate which has run off into a magic la-la land in the popular press.”—Rodney Brooks, founder Rethink Robotics and iRobot
 
“A must read for those who aspire to be effective contributors to the robotics of our future.”—David R. Scott, Commander, Apollo 15

Autorentext

David A. Mindell is Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT. He has twenty-five years of experience as an engineer in undersea robotic exploration, as a veteran of more than thirty oceanographic expeditions, and as a pilot and engineer of autonomous aircraft. He is the award-winning author of Iron Coffin: War Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor and Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight. He founded Humatics Corporation, which creates technologies to render autonomy transparent, safe, and trustworthy by transforming how robots and autonomous systems work in human environments.

Leseprobe

CHAPTER 1

Human, Remote, Autonomous

LATE IN THE NIGHT, HIGH ABOVE THE ATLANTIC OCEAN IN THE LONG, OPEN STRETCH between Brazil and Africa, an airliner encountered rough weather. Ice clogged the small tubes on the aircraft’s nose that detected airspeed and transmitted the data to the computers flying the plane. The computers could have continued flying without the information, but they had been told by their programmers that they could not.

The automated, fly-by-wire system gave up, turned itself off, and handed control to the human pilots in the cockpit: thirty-two-year-old Pierre Cedric Bonin and thirty-seven-year-old David Robert. Bonin and Robert, both relaxed and a little fatigued, were caught by surprise, suddenly responsible for hand flying a large airliner at high altitude in bad weather at night. It is a challenging task under the best of circumstances, and one they had not handled recently. Their captain, fifty-eight-year-old Marc Debois, was off duty back in the cabin. They had to waste precious attention to summon him.

Even though the aircraft was flying straight and level when the computers tripped off, the pilots struggled to make sense of the bad air data. One man pulled back, the other pushed forward on his control stick. They continued straight and level for about a minute, then lost control.

On June 1, 2009, Air France flight 447 spiraled into the ocean, killing more than two hundred passengers and crew. It disappeared below the waves, nearly without a trace.

In the global, interconnected system of international aviation, it is unacceptable for an airliner to simply disappear. A massive, coordinated search followed. In just a few days traces of flight 447 were located on the ocean’s surface. Finding the bulk of the wreckage, however, and the black box data recorders that held the keys to the accident’s causes, required hunting across a vast seafloor, and proved frustratingly slow.

More than two years later, two miles deep on the seafloor, nearly beneath the very spot where the airliner hit the ocean, an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, called Remus 6000 glided quietly through the darkness and extreme pressure. Moving at just faster than a human walking pace, the torpedo-shaped robot maintained a precise altitude of about two hundred feet off the bottom, a position at which its ultrasonic scanning sonar returns the sharpest images. As the sonars pinged to about a half mile out either side, the robot collected gigabytes of data from the echoes.

The terrain is mountainous, so the seafloor rose quickly. Despite its intelligence, the robot occasionally bumped into the bottom, mostly without injury. Three such robots worked in a coordinated dance: two searched underwater at any given time, while a third one rested on a surface ship in a three-hour pit stop with its human handlers to offload data, charge batteries, and take on new search plans.

On the ship, a team of twelve engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, including leader Mike Purcell, who spearheaded the design and development of the searching vehicles, worked in twelve-hour shifts, busy as any pit crew. When a vehicle came to the surface, it took about forty-five minutes for the engineers to download the…