Challenges in Human Computer Interaction: Robots as Bicycles

A young Steve Jobs, at the beginning of his career, used to say that computers are like a bicycle for our minds. If we consider the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet, humans perform pretty poorly. However, if we allow humans to use bicycles, the result is very different and humans tops any other animal. With this example Jobs pointed out that what really sets apart humans from other species is that they are tool builders (remember the famous "The Dawn Of Man" scene from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) and computers are the most remarkable tool that human kind ever came up with - bicycles for our minds-.

Under this perspective, robots are bicycles for our bodies. They are tools that humans build to enhance or overcome limitations of their physical bodies, in particular in terms of speed and precision. Robots are tools commonly used in industrial settings to build products; in many cases it would be impossible or extremely difficult or expansive to substitute these robots with human work-force (take a look for example at this video for an industrial robotic manipulator). Aside from industrial robots, there are space explorations, for example: some people argue that the mankind Conquest of Space will only happen through robots, because the human body alone is a fragile shell with little hope to survive in space. With similar considerations, a lot of researchers have developed a special type of robot called exoskeleton, which substantially provide a mechanical layer to the human body, allowing people to lift weights that they could not be able to manipulate otherwise. Obvious applications of exoskeletons are in space explorations, industrial settings and military, but it is easy to foresee how exoskeleton could possibly land one day on the consumer market (take a look at this exoskeleton by Cyberdyne).

Computers, though, are not only tools. In fact, computers have more recently became also the ultimate media, a content platform. Many of us do not use computers only to create content, but also to consume it: we play games, watch movies, listen to musical, surf the internet on computers. It comes hence natural to see if this paradigm also applies to robots. Can robots be content platforms? In the past years and during the time I spent running interviews for this series of posts, I have realized that a lot of people and roboticists take this approach seriously, developing general purpose robots which run several type of applications: in many research labs, I have seen generic anthropomorphic robots that can work with interchangeable programs in order to become teachers for children, toys, service robots, or remote telepresence for humans.

Having being trained as interface designer, I think that detaching the interface from its application -the platform from its content- is a very dangerous thing to do and rarely works. Desktop PCs and mobile devices like smart-phones, are perhaps the greatest exception, since they provide the base for a generic technological platform over which different developers can create a great variety of content. However, in most cases, interfaces are dependent and strictly connected (if not inseparable) with their purposes.

Chopsticks work well for food that is served in small pieces (i.e., Japanese, Chinese and Korean food) and don't work well whenever the food is served uncut (eating a steak with chopsticks?); keyboards are great for typing text, but terrible for drawings (while tablets are the opposite); steering wheels provide an ideal mapping for driving cars, but not for motorcycles or bicycles. I could continue with a list of examples, but I am sure you understood and agree with me: in most cases, specific applications require specific interfaces, and when making these interfaces, a good designer should start form the applications (the user needs, the constraints, the problem to be solved) and not trying to develop a general purpose interface to which later apply possible applications and content.

Coming back to robots, I see two parallel directions for their future development. On one side, we will have robots that enhance our physical body, allowing us to perform task that we cannot do otherwise: in this sense, robots will be tools for humans. The second direction, however, will be to design and develop specific-purpose robots: as we have small computers inside most of modern appliances (e.g. washer machines) that control their functioning, so we will have specific purpose robots in our homes, that will replace currently available products. Perhaps at first we will not call them robots -as we do not call computers a washer machine or an elevator- but robots is exactly what they are.