The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (34 page)

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Where does that leave social robotics? Since Baxter came on the scene, ‘everybody's saying they've got collaborative robots,' chuckles Brooks. ‘But some of them are just dressed up, oldstyle interfaces. Industrial robots have not been made easy to use because it's engineers who use them, and they like that complexity. We made them popular by making them easy to use.'

But as people and money flood into the field, artificial intelligence with social smarts is developing fast, says Brooks. Take Google's self-driving car: the original algorithms were found to be useless in traffic. The cars would become trapped at four-way stop sign intersections because they couldn't read other drivers' intentions. The solution came in part by incorporating social skills into the algorithm.

Brooks hopes that Baxter will become smart and cheap enough that researchers will develop applications beyond manufacturing. Updates to its operating system already allow the latest model Baxters to be twice as accurate and operate three times faster than earlier models.

Brian Scassellati, who studied under Brooks and is now a professor of computer science at Yale University, also believes robots are about to leave the factory and enter homes and schools. ‘We're entering a new era … something we saw with computers 30 years ago. Robotics is following that same curve,' he says. ‘They are going to have a very important impact on populations that need a little bit of extra help, whether that's children learning a new language, adults who are ageing and forgetful, or children with autism spectrum disorder who are struggling to learn social behaviour.'

In 2012, Scassellati's Social Robotics Lab began a five-year, US$10 million US National Science Foundation program with Stanford University, MIT and the University of Southern California to develop a new breed of ‘socially assistive' robots designed to help young children learn to read, overcome cognitive disabilities and perform physical exercises.

‘At the end of five years, we'd like to have robots that can guide a child towards long-term educational goals … and basically grow and develop with the child,' he says.

Despite the progress in human–robot interaction that has led to machines such as Baxter, Scassellati's challenge is still daunting. It requires robots to detect, analyse and respond to children in a classroom; to adapt to their interactions, taking into account each child's physical, social and cognitive differences; and to develop learning systems that achieve targeted lesson goals over weeks and months.

To try to achieve this, robots will be deployed in schools and homes for up to a year, with the researchers monitoring their work and building a knowledge base.

Early indications are that real gains can be made in education, says Velonaki. Another of her collaborators, cognitive psychologist Katsumi Watanabe of the University of Tokyo, has tested the interaction of autistic children over several days with three types of robot: a fluffy toy that talks and reacts; a humanoid with cables and wires visible; and a lifelike android. Children usually prefer the fluffy toy to start with, but as they interact with the humanoid, and later the android, they grow in confidence and interaction skills – and have been known to interact with the android's human operators when they emerge from behind the controls.

‘By the time they go to the android, they're almost ready to interact with a real human,' she says.

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The number one fear people have of smart, lifelike humanoid robots is not that they're creepy – but that they will take people's jobs. And according to some economists and social researchers, we are right to worry.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT's Center for Digital Business say that, even before the global financial crisis in 2008, a disturbing trend was visible. From 2000 to 2007, US GDP and productivity rose faster than they had in any decade since the 1960s – yet employment growth slowed to a crawl. They believe this was due to automation, and that the trend will only accelerate as big data, connectivity and cheaper robots become more commonplace.

‘The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,' they write in their book,
Race Against the Machine.

Economic historian Carl Benedikt Frey and artificial intelligence researcher Michael Osborne at the University of Oxford agree. They estimate that 47 per cent of American jobs could be replaced ‘over the next decade or two' including ‘most workers in transportation and logistics … together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations'.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the robot industry takes the opposite view: that the widespread introduction of robots in the workplace will create jobs – specifically, jobs that would otherwise go offshore to developing countries. And they may have a point.

In June 2014, for example, the European Union launched the US$3.6 billion Partnership for Robotics in Europe initiative, known as SPARC. The EU calls it the world's largest robotics research program and expects it will ‘create more than 240 000 jobs'.

Job growth is certainly happening at Denmark's Universal Robots, which also makes collaborative robots. The company has grown 40-fold in the last four years, employs 110 people and is putting on another 50 in 2014. Its robots – UR5 and UR10 – look like disembodied arms with cameras attached. They are operated by desktop controllers and taught tasks using tablet computers.
They are not as social as Baxter, but they are able to work alongside humans.

‘The more a company is allowed to automate, the more successful and productive it is, allowing it to employ more people,' chief executive Enrico Krog Iversen told
The Financial Times
in May 2014. But the jobs they will be doing will change, he argues. ‘People themselves need to be upgraded so they can do something value-creating.'

That's been true for some robot clients. Both Universal Robots and Rethink Robotics say customers have hired more people as output in small companies has increased.

Brooks believes the fear that robots are going to take away all the jobs is overplayed. The reality could be the opposite, he argues. It's not only advanced Western economies that are faced with a shrinking human workforce as their populations age. Even China is facing a demographic crisis. The number of adults in the workforce will drop to 67 per cent by 2050, he says. By the time we're old and infirm, we could all be reliant on robots.

‘I'm not worried about them taking jobs,' quips Brooks, ‘I'm worried we're not going to have enough smart robots to help us.'

I, wormbot: The next step in artificial intelligence

The mind of Michio Kaku

How dust affects climate, health and … everything

Tim Low

Big things are made up of many small things.

That was especially obvious in September 2009 when extreme winds roared across outback Australia, agitating soil laid bare by drought to produce the giant dust storm known as Red Dawn that engulfed eastern Australia, reddening skies from southern NSW to north Queensland, fanning bushfires, damaging crops, delaying planes, halting construction work, triggering smoke alarms, driving up hospital admissions, smearing windows and walls and seeping inside homes to coat floors and furniture in fine powder.

This herculean event, which elicited comparisons with nuclear winter, Armageddon and the planet Mars, swept on to New Zealand, where it sent asthmatics to hospital and dusted alpine snow. In NSW alone the event cost an estimated $330 million in lost topsoil, crop damage, car smashes, worker absenteeism, cleaning and the closure of Sydney Airport.

The particles behind the strife were so small that 100 000 weighed a mere gram, but they rose up in such numbers that Australia managed to lose more than a million tonnes of soil, broadcast into the Tasman Sea and sprinkled over New Zealand.
The drama surprised the nation, but Red Dawn was by no means the first onslaught of dust to hit the east coast and it won't be the last. In the inland, they're more common: the most recent in Bedourie, western Queensland, when day turned to night last December and dust enveloped the town for more than 90 minutes. Australia is one of the great dust-producing lands, the main source in the southern hemisphere. If Australia faces a drier future, it will be a dustier one as well.

When it enters the sea, dust can make a big difference. The iron that makes our deserts red is a potent fertiliser for plankton, the primary producers in the ocean. Red Dawn wasn't studied as a fertilising event, but dramatic dust storms in 2002–3 were linked to a drop in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was attributed to plankton taking in more carbon because they were photosynthesising more. So, farmers who flog their paddocks help the fish in the sea by helping the algae that sustain marine life. Some scientists have warned that to plant millions of trees to reduce carbon dioxide could backfire if there is less dust from degraded lands reaching the sea, although that conclusion has been disputed. Australian dust is first-class fertiliser, with 50 per cent more iron than the global average.

Dust comes and goes everywhere. Dust from the Lake Eyre basin – Australia's dust hotspot – is thought to reach the Philippines, Antarctica and Patagonia, carried on the prevailing winds. It may well be fertilising Borneo rainforests, just as Saharan dust fertilises the Amazon, and central Asian topsoil enriches Hawaii. Like the internet, dust connects the world. New Zealand receives so much dust from Australia – up to 200 000 tonnes in a single event – that Australians go there to study it. Scientists can tell where in Australia the dust comes from by testing which of 25 trace elements it contains; some grains found on Fox Glacier were traced back to Wilcannia in western NSW. Before reaching New Zealand, Australia's dust grains dance past the smokestacks
of coal-fired power stations and mines, acquiring pollutants such as lead, nickel, copper and zinc, which show up on New Zealand glaciers at high enough levels to cause concern. Smoke from bushfires journeys across as well, and spores of wheat rust, a feared disease that ravages whole crops.

Dust is rich in information. Places in which it accrues are archives, able to inform us about past climates (ice ages are super dusty), past wind directions and past activities. In a peat mire in Kosciuszko National Park, some of the lead in the dust can be traced to the first mines at Broken Hill in the 19th century and to Australia's first leaded fuel in the 1930s. Industrial arsenic, zinc, copper and cadmium are also stored in that remote alpine site. The mire shows that Australia became much dustier after 1869 as farmers opened up the land and rabbits chewed it bare, to reach an acme during the Federation Drought. There was so much topsoil in transit then that, to quote one observer, ‘Every fence, at some point or other, was so far buried that stock could go from paddock to paddock.' One pastoralist wrote about ‘three parts of this country blown further east'. Australia today is less dusty, because many of the grains that could blow away have done so, and because many landholders have embraced Landcare and the National Soil Conservation Program.

The dust that settles in our homes is a bit of everything. There are mineral particles from soil and buildings, fibres from wood and paper, fragments of foam rubber and plastic, paint flakes, food particles, soot from cooking, the droppings of cockroaches and silverfish, pet dander, human excretions and secretions, and other organic debris such as the desiccated moth our shoe may have crushed into the carpet. Near open windows there are more grains of sand, leaf particles and pollen, while the soft grey dust under the bed is less diverse and dominated by shed skin and textile fibres. The ingredients of most importance to humans include mite droppings, pollen and lead.

The animals that dominate our dust are tiny mites. Hordes of mite species find their way into homes to live in flour and other dried foods, on pets, mice and pot plants. Of the true dust specialists one home rarely has more than ten species, with as many as five in a carpet, one of which is apt to dominate. The world's most successful dust dweller, likely to be in your bed and mine, is a minuscule mite with a very long name,
Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus.

Fodder for dust mites includes the flakes of bacteria-laden skin we constantly shed, along with pollen grains, fungi and plant fibres. They do especially well on the dried semen found on sheets, a rich source of protein and sugars. In our beds they do best at the warm foot end and worst in the hot central zone our bodies occupy. They prefer the sheet and blanket above us to the quilt or bottom sheet. They like buttons and seams. They burrow up to two centimetres into foam mattresses which, by holding moisture, suit them better than mattresses with springs. The air turbulence we create when we slide into bed, and the thermals generated by our heat, ensure we inhale mite droppings left on our sheets.

Dust mites lurk in carpets, sofas, curtains and even mould on walls. They can crawl only a few centimetres a minute, but they are adept at hitchhiking. When some dyed mites were released onto a sofa they soon appeared in other rooms and within ten days were in the family car. So when we visit friends, mites on clothes are part of our entourage. A cardigan can carry well over 200. Dust mites turn up in Antarctic field stations and even in the Mir Space Station.