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Are you looking at me?
Domestic robots could be controlled by online workers. Will we invite strangers on the internet into our homes?
In 2012, researchers at Silicon Valley robotics start-up Willow Garage thought they had the ideal solution for tidying their messy office. They would pay online workers to control humanoid PR2 robots remotely, cleaning up empty mugs and dirty dishes at the end of each day.
The robots would look at you and you’d have no idea who was on the other side. People got uncomfortable.
Willow Garage’s experiment, however, lasted less than a month. Instead of welcoming their cybernetic cleaners, employees were creeped out. “The robots would look at you and you’d have no idea who was on the other side,” recalls Maya Cakmak, then an intern at the company. “People got really uncomfortable.”
Now an assistant professor of robotics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Cakmak is trying again. By obscuring personal items in the video feed seen by the cleaning robot’s operator, she may have found a way to keep everyone happy.
(/t BEKZOD
