Yet another Hacker News

"Robot" Is a Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not a Robot

24 points birdculture 2 hours ago 28 comments

bartvk 1 hour ago | parent

I strongly advise the podcast "Robot Or Not". The hosts have very strong opinions on what exactly constitutes a robot, and readers write in with edge cases. It's been going on for a long time, so nowadays they also categorize other things.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/robot-or-not/id9979302...

https://open.spotify.com/show/4M2AELzmQy77FxaYZMl6e9

https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/robot-or-not/b911efc0-e2f6-0...

nizmow 1 hour ago | parent

And if you get a taste for opinionated Siracusa, look up the toaster ovens saga.

walrus01 1 hour ago | parent

The Crushinator might disagree if the premise is that an appliance/machine shaped thing can't be a robot.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=futurama+...

michaelt 1 hour ago | parent

I once had a robotics professor who argued any definition of 'robot' broad enough to include roombas and self-driving cars and industrial robot arms (even if made narrow enough to exclude remote-control toy cars, cars with cruise control, CNC mills and washing machines) would inevitably define cruise missiles as robots. Meaning the world had 'killer robots' before we had digital computers.

Instead, he argued the definition of a robot is "I know it when I see it"

TomGarden 1 hour ago | parent

"I know it when I see it" has to be up there in terms of useless thought-terminating clichés together with "no smoke without fire" and "if he wanted to he would"

kgwgk 1 hour ago | parent

For those unaware, this was famously stated as a test for hardcore pornography by a Supreme Court of the US justice in 1964.

TomGarden 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah. It's really bothersome.

I think the modern day equivalent is the constant huffing and puffing around where to draw the line for tech legislation, with the implicit message that 'if a line is hard to draw, we should not draw it' and a constant bad-faith battle for perfectly defined legislation.

The answer to 'where do we draw the line for this thing that has widespread negative effects' is always "somewhere".

nkrisc 38 minutes ago | parent

The point is that there is no objective measure one can use and the definition at any given time is dependent on the cultural and societal context.

Something that might have been considered pornography 100 years ago might be considered tame today.

roenxi 28 minutes ago | parent

It goes a bit further than that. If there isn't a somewhat objective definition then you can't ever be sure that two people are talking about the same thing. Sharing the same context isn't enough to reliably get a convergence of beliefs about whether something falls into a category. And it is a mistake to start legislating about it because the laws are going to be meaningless.

TomGarden 13 minutes ago | parent

What I mean is that throwing up your hands and saying 'I know it when I see it' is entirely pointless. There's a reason scientific papers have an (often long) section for definitions.

dauertewigkeit 1 hour ago | parent

What's wrong with a cruise missle being defined as a robot? It is one.

Also I'd argue that a CNC machine is a robot as well, no different than a programmable industrial robotic arm.

IMHO, a dishwasher isn't a robot because it is neither versatile in its objective, nor programmable.

chii 1 hour ago | parent

> neither versatile in its objective, nor programmable.

how programmable does it have to be for the robotic classification to stick? A cruise missile also cannot be programmed to be general - you can only program it to follow a trajectory. Just like you can only program a dishwasher to do dishes in a particular way.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

Most robots are programmed to do one thing well. You could program a cruise missile to fly around in circles or chase the sun, just like you could program an industrial robot arm to wave like a music conductor, but they don't because that doesn't match the goals of their users.

michaelt 6 minutes ago | parent

> Also I'd argue that a CNC machine is a robot as well, no different than a programmable industrial robotic arm.

It's true - a robot arm is not so different from a CNC machine.

But a 5-axis CNC is not so different from a 3-axis CNC, a 3-axis CNC is not so different from a laser cutter, a laser cutter is not so different from a vinyl cutter, a vinyl cutter is not so different from a large-format printer, and a large-format printer is no so different from an inkjet printer.

PowerElectronix 5 minutes ago | parent

A cruise missile is much less versatile and programmable than a dishwasher.

You can program a diswhasher to brew beer.

ktallett 1 hour ago | parent

Roombas, self driving cars, industrial robot arms (depending on what they do), cruise control,cruise missiles, are all robots by the dictionary definition. They react to their environment. That's the classifier.

His view of I know it when I see it is nuts but he is right on many of the classifications. Some were incorrect though. But a robot is just anything that has a sensor to interact with the environment.

We have simply changed the meaning to be more human like which is not accurate.

michaelt 32 minutes ago | parent

> They react to their environment. That's the classifier.

An industrial robot arm, out of the box, only has internal sensing (joint position, torque etc) and a start/stop button - can't sense the external environment at all.

But I've got a light on my porch that turns on when it gets dark.

By the 'react to the environment' definition the former is not a robot, and the latter is.

ostacke 36 minutes ago | parent

A cruise missile being a robot is not far-fetched, I’d say. In Swedish both cruise and ballistic missiles (and other similar munitions) are called robots within the military.

stymaar 24 minutes ago | parent

An anti-tank mine is a robot.

vincnetas 59 minutes ago | parent

Robot etymology is from Czech robota, robotník, robotiti. To work, worker, to do work. I especially like "road works" signs in Poland saying "uwaga roboty drogowe" and translate/visualise it in my mind like "Danger robots on the road"

jareklupinski 15 minutes ago | parent

the phrase "workers took my work" <-> "robots took my job"

singularity2001 25 minutes ago | parent

the common distinction between robot and machine is that machines are mostly stationary and don't move by themselves. (Self-driving cars sit in between, depending on further developments, they might slide into the bot category.)

stymaar 25 minutes ago | parent

Same for “drones”: a cruise missile is as much of a drone as a Shahed 136, and remote-controlled boats or planes are also technically drones.

blitzar 19 minutes ago | parent

Sorry to be pedantic - but the correct naming is "kamikaze drone" or "suicide drone" when The Bad Guys (tm) use them and "Cruise Missile" or "Precision Drone" when The Good Guys (tm) deploy them.

They are all killer robots

TacticalCoder 18 minutes ago | parent

Roomba and the likes are definitely robots. The advanced ones have cameras, map your floor, vaccuum clean, water clean, etc. You can contact them remotely (a friend uses her cleaning robot to spy on her husband while he's at home!) and give them orders.

Nobody ever said "robot" meant "machines with AGI thinking": robot, literally as defined by the person mentioned in TFA and who coined the term, meant "to work" / "forced labor". Work/labor that could be done by servants.

If cleaning my entire apartment by vaccuum cleaning, water cleaning, giving me reports about it, obeying my orders (e.g. if I tell to stop) ain't "automated labor that could have been done by a servant", I don't know what is.

michaelbuckbee 17 minutes ago | parent

"The utility of a robot is inversely proportional to how much it looks like a robot." -- Buckbee's law.

AnonymousPlanet 12 minutes ago | parent

But your ordinary traffic light might be called a "robot" by social norm. At least if you live in South Africa.