The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (33 page)

Finally, Milgram varied the setting in which the experiment took place. One condition took place in the industrial town of Bridgeport, far from the ivied halls of Yale, the study's home base.

Making systematic sense of those variations did not interest Milgram himself, but we have published a first attempt in the journal
PLOS ONE.
Using his original data and backed up by research at Yale University's archives, we synthesised data from 21 of his experimental conditions, involving 740 participants in all.

We classified the 21 conditions in terms of differing roles of the experimenter, teacher, learner and the relationships between the three.

Setting aside the broader problems with the experiment's internal validity, evidence of participant scepticism, and the lack of standardised procedures, we aimed to tease out which of the many features of his different variations accounted for whether or not teachers went to the maximum voltage on the shock machine.

According to our analysis, the most powerful factor was whether or not the experimenter directed the teacher to administer the constantly rising shock levels. In conditions where the teacher was free to choose the shock levels, very few proceeded to the maximum voltage.

Obedience levels were significantly lower when there was dissent between the experimenters, when there was support for disobedience among the teachers and when the experimenter was absent from the room.

Interestingly, it was no higher when the experimenter was a more legitimate authority figure, or when the experiment was conducted in a more prestigious institutional setting.

By implication, obedience is strongest when authority figures give concrete directives, present a united front and maintain close contact with their subordinates. It is also strongest when subordinates lack collective support for resistance.

We found that the relationship between the learner and the teacher was equally important. Teachers were more likely to refuse to continue when the learner was physically close, when
the learner was an intimate of the teacher and when the teacher had a direct link to the learner.

Obedience – in the Milgram paradigm at least – is not only a matter of the subordinate's relationship to the authority figure. This is where most Milgram scholarship focuses, but it is only part of the story. Social relationships with people other than an authority figure are a powerful influence.

Ironically, because they were isolated in an experimental laboratory, Milgram's subjects lacked the advantage available to others in the world outside when they are being coerced and pressured to obey. In the face of bullying, the best strategy is to find allies, form alliances, and stick together.

Honest placebos

Imagine there's new metrics (it's easy if you try)

Social robots are coming

Social robots are coming

Wilson da Silva

There is something unnerving about Geminoid F. She looks like a Japanese woman in her 20s, about 165 cm tall with long dark hair, brown eyes and soft pearly skin. She breathes, blinks, smiles, sighs, frowns, and speaks in a soft, considered tone.

But the soft skin is made of silicon, and underneath it lies urethane foam flesh, a metal skeleton and a plastic head. Her movements are powered by pressurised gas, and an air compressor is hidden behind her seat. She sits with her lifelike hands folded casually on her lap. She – one finds it hard to say ‘it' – was recently on loan to the Creative Robotics Lab at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where robotics researcher David Silvera-Tawil set her up for a series of experiments.

‘For the first three or four days, I would get a shock when I came into the room early in the morning,' he says. ‘I'd feel that there was someone sitting there looking at me. I knew there was going to be a robot inside, and I knew it was not a person. But it happened every time!'

The director of the lab, Mari Velonaki, an experimental visual artist turned robotics researcher, has been collaborating with Geminoid F's creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, who has pioneered the design of lifelike androids at his Intelligent Robotics
Laboratory in Osaka University. Their collaboration seeks to understand ‘presence' – the feeling we have when another human is in our midst. Can this sensation be reproduced by robots?

Velonaki has also experienced the shock of encountering Geminoid F. ‘It's not about repulsion,' she says. ‘It's an eerie, funny feeling. When you're there at night, and you switch off the pneumatics … it's strange. I've worked with many robots; I really like them. But there's a moment when there's an element of … strangeness.'

This strangeness has also been observed with hyper-real video or movie animations. It even has a name: ‘the uncanny valley': it's the sense of disjunction we experience when the impression that something is alive and human does not entirely match the evidence of our senses.

For all her disturbing attributes, Geminoid F's human-like qualities are strictly skin deep. She is actually a fancy US$100 000 puppet, who is partly driven by algorithms that move her head and face in lifelike ways, and partly guided by operators from behind the scenes. They oversee her questions and answers to ensure they're relevant. Geminoid F is not meant to be smart. She's been created to help establish the etiquette of human–robot relations.

Which is why those studying her are cross-disciplinary types. ‘We hope that collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers can get us closer to a goal of building robots that interact with humans in more natural, intuitive and meaningful ways,' says Silvera-Tawil.

It is hoped Geminoid F will help pave the way for robots to take their first steps out of the fields and factory cages to work alongside us. In the near future her descendants – some human-like, others less so – will be looking after the elderly and teaching children.

It will happen sooner than you think.

* * * * *

Rodney Brooks has been called ‘the bad boy of robotics'. More than once he has turned the field upside down, bulldozing shibboleths with new approaches that have turned out to be prophetic and influential.

Born in Adelaide, he moved to the US in 1977 for his PhD, and by 1984 he was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he created insect-like robots that, with very little brainpower, could navigate over rough terrain and climb steps. At the time, the dominant paradigm was that robot mobility required massive processing power and a highly advanced artificial intelligence. Brooks reasoned that insects had puny brains and yet could move and navigate, so he created simple independent ‘brains' for each of the six legs of his robots, which followed basic commands (always stay upright irrespective of direction of motion), while a simple ‘overseer' brain coordinated collaborative movement. His work spawned what is now known as behaviour-based robotics, used by field robots in mining and bomb demolition robots.

But it is the work he began in the 1990s – developing humanoid robots and exploring human–robot interactions – that may be an even greater game changer. First he created Cog, a humanoid robot of exposed wires, mechanical arms and a head with camera eyes, programmed to respond to humans. Cog's intelligence grew in the same way a child's does – by interacting with people. The Cog experiment fathered social robotics, in which autonomous machines interact with humans by using social cues and responding in ways people intuitively understand.

Brooks believes robots are about to become more commonplace, with ‘social robots' leading the way. Consider the demographics – the percentage of working-age adults in the US and Europe is around 80 per cent, a statistic that has remained largely
unchanged for 40 years. But over the next 40 years, this will fall to 69 per cent in the US and 64 per cent in Europe as the boomers retire.

‘As the people of retirement age increase, there'll be fewer people to take care of them, and I really think we're going to have to have robots to help us,' Brooks says. ‘I don't mean companions – I mean robots doing things, like getting groceries from the car, up the stairs into the kitchen. I think we'll all come to rely on robots in our daily lives.'

In the 1990s, he and two of his MIT graduate students, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, founded iRobot Corp, maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. It was the first company to bring robots to the masses – 12 million of their products have been sold worldwide, and more than one million are now sold every year.

The company began by developing military robots for bomb disposal work. Known as PackBots, they're rovers on caterpillar tracks packed with sensors and with a versatile arm. They've since been adapted for emergency rescue, handling hazardous materials or working alongside police hostage teams to locate snipers in city environments. More than 5000 have been deployed worldwide. They were the first to enter the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011 – although they failed in their bid to vent explosive hydrogen from the plant.

With the success of the Roomba, iRobot has since launched other domestic lines: the floor mopping Braava, the gutter cleaning Looj, and Mirra for pools. Its latest offering is the tall, free-standing RP-VITA, a telemedicine health care robot approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2013. It drives itself to pre-operative and post-surgical patients within a hospital, allowing doctors to assess them remotely.

Other companies have sprouted up in the past 15 years manufacturing robots that run across rocky terrain, manoeuvre in caves and underwater, or that can be thrown into hostile
situations to provide intelligence.

Robot skills have grown through advances in natural language processing, artificial speech, vision and machine learning, and the proliferation of fast and inexpensive computing aided by access to the internet and big data. Computers can now tackle problems that, until recently, only people could handle. It's a self-reinforcing loop – as machines understand the real world better, they learn faster.

Robots that can interact with ordinary people are the next step. This is where Brooks comes in. ‘We have enough understanding of human–computer interaction, and human–robot interaction, to start building robots that can really interact with people,' he says. ‘An ordinary person, with no programming knowledge, can show it how to do something useful.'

In 2008 Brooks founded another company, Rethink Robotics, which has done exactly that – created a collaborative robot that can safely work elbow-to-elbow with humans. Baxter requires no programming and learns on the job, much as humans do. If you want it to pick an item from a conveyor belt, scan it and place it with others in a box, you grasp its mechanical hand and guide it through the entire routine. It works out what you mean it to do and goes to work.

Baxter is cute too. Its face is an electronic screen, dominated by big, expressive cartoon eyes. When its sonar detects someone entering a room, it turns and looks at them, raising its virtual eyebrows. When Baxter picks something up, it looks at the arm it's about to move, signalling to co-workers what it's going to do. When Baxter is confused, it raises an eyebrow and shrugs.

Baxter, priced at an affordable US$25 000, is aimed at small to medium businesses for whom robots have been prohibitively expensive until now.

While robots are a big business today, generating US$29 billion in annual sales, the market is still dominated by old-school
industrial machines – disembodied arms reliant on complex and rigid programming. These automatons haven't really changed much from those that began to appear on factory floors in the 1960s. They are stand-alone machines stuck in cages, hardwarebased and unsafe for people to be around. Nevertheless, 1.35 million now operate worldwide, with 162 000 new ones sold every year. They're used for welding, painting, assembly, packaging, product inspection and testing – all accomplished with speed and precision 24 hours a day.

But Baxter and his ilk are starting to shake up the field. ‘In the new style of robots, there's a lot of software with common-sense knowledge built in,' says Brooks.

Launched in 2012, Baxter is used in 18 countries with applications such as manufacturing, health care and education. Rethink Robotics' backers include Amazon's Jeff Bezos, whose own company is a big user of robots to handle goods in its warehouses.

When Google revealed in December 2013 it had acquired eight robotics companies, it sent a thunderbolt through the field. Google created a division led by Andy Rubin, the man who spearheaded Android, the world's most widely used smartphone software and who began his career as a robotics engineer. Only a month later, Google shelled out US$650 million to buy Deep-Mind Technologies, a secretive artificial intelligence company in London developing general-purpose learning algorithms.

‘As of 2014, things are finally changing,' says Dennis Hong, who heads the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at the University of California in Los Angeles. ‘The fact that Google bought these companies shows that, finally, it's time for the robotics business to really start.'