Humanoid Robot Keeps Getting Fired From His Jobs (wsj.com) 55
Pepper, SoftBank's robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn't recognize the faces of family members. From a report: Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group, kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster." Pepper was fired. The company ended its lease of the robot and sent it back to the manufacturer. After a rash of similar mishaps across Japan, in which Pepper botched its job at a nursing home and gave baseball fans a creepy feeling, some people are saying the humanoid itself will need a funeral soon.
"Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps.
SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.
"Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps.
SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.
Robots are becoming more human (Score:5, Funny)
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I've always thought that making robots that interact with people in a humanoid form is a mistake, and will be until their capabilities are far more developed. People are going to assume that a humanoid robot, even something as bizarre as Handle, has human-ish capabilities. That's why Spot and Anymal are such a success in comparison, no one expects a dog to be as capable as a human.
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It's a giant mistake because we continue to try to make humanoid robots (even arms/fingers) to replace humans doing jobs that humans designed for humans to do.
Every single jump in automation and efficiency that we've ever made required us to redesign the job so it was doable by robots, not try to make robots human enough to do the job.
We didn't try to create robots which could read handwriting, we made optical scanners and multiple-choice bubble sheets. We didn't create robots which could open sodas and pou
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Microsoft just ordered 20,000.
Re: Robots are becoming more human (Score:2)
Soon they will demand UBI and universal repair.
Robot Reading Scripture? (Score:3)
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Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business.
So the vendor didn't necessarily push, but they did have an interested funeral/plastic customer (the fact that you have plastics/funeral under one corporate umbrella is weird enough).
It is hard for me to imagine mourners that both care about having a ceremony presided over and yet ok with a robot doing it instead of a human.
Re: Robot Reading Scripture? (Score:2)
The Key question is: Are we now allowed to send our robots to the funerals or not ?
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How different would it be to send a telepresence robot to a funeral than to watch it on a webcast? The latter is quite common already for relatives who can't travel to the location of the service, a sister-in-law in Peru had more online attendees in the middle of their COVID lockdown than in-person attendees.
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I can't disagree. It does seem quite impersonal.
I think that Japanese culture is more open and accustomed to robots than ours is in the West (thus far anyway). But I'm not really familiar enough with Buddhism to know whether their view of their sacred writings is similar to those of Christianity or other Abrahamic faiths. So maybe there it could work in theory. But probably not if the robot decides to mimic the less admirable qualities of human nature, rather than those that are at least arguably more s
Re: Robot Reading Scripture? (Score:2)
It's not really all that different from downloading a phone app that speaks the bible to you.
Re: Robot Reading Scripture? (Score:4, Informative)
Which I have actually [youversion.com] . . . it lets me listen through the Bible while I'm driving, and, hence, all the way through (NT+Psalms+Proverbs about twice, balance of the OT once) roughly every 7 months. It's nice.
But I'm not (usually) grieving during that time, and I'm not hoping for some degree of compassion and sympathy for a loss.
A robot that tried to do the same at the funeral of a loved one would probably ook me out, although, as mentioned previously, I'm not Japanese, and if I were I might feel differently, since their culture is far more accustomed to robots in general than mine.
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Every 7 months? Isn't that a little excessive?
Most people are atheist after the first pass, the second at most. And at that point, there are far more entertaining things to read.
Re: Robot Reading Scripture? (Score:2)
I used to read the Silmarillion every year. You start to build a deeper understanding of what is a very complex and dense work.
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Hmm.
Here is what it does for me.
It reminds me when I do listen . . but especially when I don't . . . that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."
It confirms my understanding and belief that He Is.
It helps me to better know God, and myself, and those around me.
It points out my many, MANY sins and other flaws, and it points me to the only One who can forgive those sins and restore a right relationship with God.
It reminds me of the incredible price Jesus paid
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Should I go on?
I'll do it for you:
"It helps me hang on to my delusions".
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I know that Tibetan Buddhists have had wind-operated prayer wheels (spinning a prayer wheel apparently serves to send the prayer written on it for you) for several centuries, so the robot is not that different.
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There are plenty of examples in the Christain world of DVD/Video/Tape-led prayer sessions. So putting a dedicated device in a place of prayer isn't that crazy of a concept.
Now why anyone would want to spend $500/mo for something a tape recorder could handle is a different question.
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There are plenty of examples in the Christain world of DVD/Video/Tape-led prayer sessions. So putting a dedicated device in a place of prayer isn't that crazy of a concept.
Now why anyone would want to spend $500/mo for something a tape recorder could handle is a different question.
The whole premise of both this and the robot are very insensitive. They can't be bothered to attend service with the bereaved? I'd take my business elsewhere.
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It's probably a situation where "We offer Christian, Buddhist, Shinto, and secular funeral ceremonies here. Since you want the Buddhist option, the standard fee to have a monk present to chant the prayers will be $X. If that's too expensive, we have a robot that's only $X-Y."
Funerary services are a business just like any other. Even Christian ministers have standard prices for this stuff.
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Yep.
The GP speaks like someone who has never had to price out a funeral. I'm glad that they are ignorant of it, given the implication, but if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, you really should STFU and listen.
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It isn't a Christian scripture, and they aren't the one bad at market research, you are.
Are you familiar with Buddhist prayer wheels [besthimalaya.com]? This is a similar concept.
Anyway, why this couldn't have been a statue with a looping cassette recorder inside, I don't know. That'd be a lot more reliable than this "robot".
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As a practicing Christian. The actual words of the Scripture are kinda useless without knowledge and context.
If a loved one died from suicide, I really don't want an algorithmic post to quote parts of the Scripture saying that they are doomed to damnation.
Of if I am feeling down because my job seems dull, I don't need description on how to prepare a meal for sacrifice.
Even if the Bible is just a bunch of made up fairy tails, there is often a moral to them, that needs to be explained at the right time and p
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As a practicing Christian. The actual words of the Scripture are kinda useless without knowledge and context.
Except none of those three things exist. So now what?
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Robot minyans today, robot minions tomorrow...
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Re: Robot Reading Scripture? (Score:2)
BUT. now you can now send your robots to all the funerals of far off relatives !
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Telepresence robots have been a thing for years. For that matter attending the funeral via webcast is extremely common. My wife has had a number of relatives and friends in Peru die of COVID19 over the past year and attended their funeral and memorial services (there are several at intervals for each) online.
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Having an actual person removely attend a ceremony via an
electronic medium is one thing, having a robo-toy
read scriptures that it has no understanding of is
quite another.
Humanoid robots are mostly vanity projects (Score:2)
and research equipment.
I have yet to see any applications where a mechanical human can do a better job than an actual human or a mechanism specifically designed to do that particular job.
Given how expensive these things are going to be for the foreseeable future, I find it unlikely that a general purpose robot that's not tailored to anything will ever win out over a special purpose robot.
Hardware is not software. The popular imagination doesn't remember that very well.
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Given how expensive these things are going to be for the foreseeable future, I find it unlikely that a general purpose robot that's not tailored to anything will ever win out over a special purpose robot.
I would say the problem with this one is it isn't expensive. $2000? I've spent more than that on a desktop PC within the last decade, and it doesn't even try to talk.
Having said that, I don't think the hardware is even the worst problem. The problem is the software. Human-machine interaction, driven by software, is just bad. An abject disaster. Anki very much had the right idea with the software for Cozmo, approaching it as if they were Disney animators, which is a fantastically good idea. Unfortunat
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FYI The pepper robots are about 30k/each, not 2k.
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Personally I think the problem is the wet ware. People expect a humanoid robot to have human-ish capabilities, which it won't for a couple decades yet. Spot and Anymal are successful because everyone is pleased that a "dog" can do those things, they would be terribly disappointed in a humanoid robot which could do **only** those things. And I think your wished for Kirby should look like a sheep or something rather than a human for much the same reason. If it looks like a person customers will be disappoi
Why are the Japanese so obsessed with humanoids? (Score:3)
Here in the west, they've been a part of our fiction (C3PO, I, Robot) but never quite a priority otherwise. Seems the only commercial interest in artificial humanoids is sex toys. When actually constructing robots, we go for form to match function for maximum efficiency. Real people aren't supposed to see them (particularly when as automation goes, they're going to replace a lot of people on factory floors). We only simulate humans in films/tv to help ensure the safety of the actors and stunt teams.
But the Japanese have been hyper-focused on self-articulating/self-acting artificial people and animals for a very long time. Many anime things have had them, like the EVE projection in Megazone 23 more than 30 years ago. It seems every 6 months there's a new story about a robot or projection, like the giant cat that went viral last week.
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Like the full-sized Gundam they're building.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/auto... [ieee.org]
Gundam's first step.
https://youtu.be/-she7IjYbQ8 [youtu.be]
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Japan has generally been at the forefront of human-hybrid or mechanical automation, both in media (manga/movies/books) and automation (car factories). Part of it comes from the Japanese work ethic of being efficient. Robots can perform the same task over and over more efficiently than a human can.
It also comes from Japan's work ethic (no, I did not repeat myself). Japan has been so focused on work that one of their outlets is fantasy. What better way to destress than read a story about mechas flying thr
Re: Why are the Japanese so obsessed with humanoid (Score:2)
Three words: Labor shortage. Sorry I know that is two words, but I could not find anyone to think of a three word description. Anyway, the Japanese need robots because they have a huge elderly population and there are not enough younger people to both take care of seniors and keep the economy and farming/manufacturing/services production going.
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That's partly because they are xenophobic and thus don't want immigrants or too many migrant workers.
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Robot caregivers, to me at least, seems like a solution that (kind of) found a problem.
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Paywalled article? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anybody got a link to a non pay-walled version of this article?
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A priest should not be a human-looking robot (Score:1)
A robot priest should look like Reverend Lionel Preacherbot
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You do you, but I want mine to look like Salma Hayek in From Dusk to Dawn.
Forget Astro Boy (Score:2)
Forget Astro Boy, Gigantor is the real deal.
Robots as priests? (Score:1)
Oh dammit, now they even take the jobs of people who don't even work in the first place.
So it can teach? (Score:2)
So far it is doing okay as a teacher. We'll see how long that lasts. But at least when it fails at that task, they can promote it into administration.
Um... that's an odd pairing. (Score:3)
Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business.
What do they know about their plastics that we don't?
Also, unless it's a robot's funeral, a robot reading scripture to mourners seems hugely insensitive, but maybe that's just me.
Keeps Getting Fired From _His_ Jobs (Score:1)
Only males get fired from jobs ?
If the developers used more female attributes, these robots would handle their jobs better.