What will the world look like when we're living and working with robots every day?

Robots work on assembly lines. They zoom around warehouses. And they even fly planes. Most of us aren't surprised to hear these stories anymore. But how will we work with robots when they're driving our cars or delivering our food?

When millions of robots populate our sidewalks, offices, and residential buildings - when they move beyond the factory floor - we'll need to learn how to interact with them, even teach them. Julie Shah, co-author of the book, What to Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration, believes we'll need to tap into our ability to create, problem solve, and learn from experience, in order to "transfer those insights to machines and integrate machines into our work and our everyday lives."

She also believes we'll need to think differently about how we design robots and how we gather and share robot data. In particular, she argues that industry and government will need to work more closely together so they can share information on robot performance. This information will help us make rapid improvements, so we can integrate robots more quickly and safely into society. She explains, "The capability of these systems is so dependent on the data used to train them. Being able to share learnings across companies and across an industry is equally important."

Julie Shah is a roboticist who directs the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT, where she is also the associate dean of social and ethic responsibilities of computing.

Episode Links

Inner Workings: Can Robots Make Good Teammates? by Carolyn Beans

Integrating Robots into Team-Oriented Environments by Julie Shah

Don Norman

Three-body problem

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

Affordance

Aviation Safety Reporting System - NASA

MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

Julie Shah's co-author Laura Major

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CM 177: Julie Shah on the Future of Robots

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CM 177: Julie Shah on the Future of Robots