HardWIRED: So, What Is a Robot Really?

[Narrator] What is a robot exactly?

Are these robots?

How about this?

Surely, a silvery humanoid hell-bent on destruction

is a robot, right?

The thing is, it's actually really hard to define a robot,

much less get roboticists to agree

on a universal definition.

That may seem trivial, but it has serious implications

as robots become a bigger part of our lives.

So, let's take a stab at defining what a robot is.

What a lot of people tend to follow is

this sense, think, act paradigm,

which is that the machine has to be capable of

somehow sensing its environment

and then thinking about or planning its next action

and then somehow acting on the world.

[Narrator] So, consider a drone

you pilot to pester your neighbors.

Is that a robot?

Well, no.

It doesn't sense its environment or think on its own.

It acts, but only because you tell it to.

But get yourself an autonomous drone,

and suddenly it's a lot more robotic.

It senses and thinks and acts on its own.

So, the key here is intelligence.

An artificial intelligence agent to me

is an agent that acts to maximize a person's utility.

So, robots have to actually work together with people

and use human guidance and human oversight

to learn more about what people actually want,

what are their values, what makes them happy.

[Narrator] So, they're no longer just the brutes

that follow a series of commands,

like a robot arm on a factory floor.

But how have they changed exactly?

What you're gonna see here is very much work in progress,

but it gives us a little bit of a glimpse into

two different definitions of robotics.

Okay, so now the robot is moving,

and I'm unhappy with it because it's keeping this

too far away from the ground, from the table.

So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna push on it a little bit,

but it just keeps on going back because its utility says

that it should stay far away from the table.

So, no matter what I do, well, it lets me deform it,

but it just goes right back to stubbornly doing it

the way it thinks is the optimal way to do the task.

So, now this is a robot that tries to optimize what I want

and tries to figure out what it is that I want.

And so, when I pushed it down,

it actually understood that, oh okay,

I must have not been doing the task right to begin with.

[Narrator] The stubborn robot is a traditional robot,

and the one that's sensitive to human needs is a new breed.

But why worry so much about semantics here?

Because robot is a loaded word.

So, I think robotics definitely has a PR problem.

It can be kind of a double-edged sword in some ways

because the word robot just generates a lot of attention

and fascination and sometimes fear.

So, you can use it to get people's attention

or to make people pay attention to your product.

It's much sexier to call something a robot

than call something a dishwasher.

[Narrator] At the same time,

robot is still a dirty word of sorts,

especially with all this talk of machines stealing jobs.

And the rise of artificial intelligence

could put even more people out of work

in the coming decades.

But is AI a robot?

No, not on its own.

A robot is a physical thing,

and that gets tricky with something like a robot tax,

meaning steal a human job, pay a fee.

Heard from people like Bill Gates,

robots should be taxed.

Okay, well, what is a robot?

Are your software products

that you disrupted labor markets with also robots?

Or is a robot something physical?

So, I think as we start to discuss the policy implications,

we're going to need more definitional work.

Robots come in different kinds,

and we have to be careful about which kind we mean

when we brand something

and when we formally define the problem

that we're working on so that we can be clear about

what it is that we're trying to achieve.

[Narrator] In the end, the machines are here to stay,

so we better get to know them.

Just be careful who you call a robot.