Why there won’t be a robot uprising any time soon

Robots lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners are really not amazingly intelligent. The grass-cutter needs an edging-tape to stop it wandering off the lawn. Robot vacuum cleaners can get Lego pieces or other debris jammed into their mechanisms. Or in the worst case, as at least one owner of an un-toilet trained puppy discovered, they might run over something messy and distribute it over a wide area. One reason that cleaning robots have not yet displaced human cleaners is that cleaners are more skilled than we often assume.

In our book, Living With Robots, we explore the gap between robots of the imagination and real robots. This gap has a big impact on how we see robots in our future. The robots of the imagination will take everyone’s jobs in the next fifteen years or even worse, enslave and then replace humanity. But those of us that work with real robots see a very different future.

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