Still unsafe at any speed?

Mindful of the fact that most of the posts on this blog are provoked by media coverage that works to further mystify AI/robotics, I thought I would break with that pattern to recognize a recent story that, to my reading, breaks with the pattern. A piece by Andrew J. Hawkins in The Verge reviews the state of robot taxis in Phoenix, Arizona. Having been assured on several occasions by tech-savvy friends that self-driving cars are in everyday operation in Phoenix, this story helps to clarify the actual state of the technology. And Hawkins raises some welcome questions as well about the claimed benefits of autonomous vehicles; questions that should be at the forefront of discussion about public investment in transportation infrastructures going forward.

While it’s not until paragraph nine that we discover that the autonomous vehicles deployed in the Waymo One taxi service actually still include a human ‘safety driver,’ there’s much to learn here. The piece is headlined by a video report from Hawkins on his own experience of the service. Hawkins points out that Alphabet/Google’s Waymo is the longest running and most extensive of the autonomous vehicle projects, with the lowest number of recorded “disengagements,” or events in which the human driver has to take over the wheel. The current trial is limited to four towns in the greater Phoenix area, and to voluntary members of Waymo’s “early rider” program (with requisite non-disclosure agreements and, we might assume, liability waivers.) We might note in the aerial views of the designated areas the Arizona landscape’s flatness, and of course we know that the reason for the old prescription to “ship your sinuses to Arizona” (familiar at least to TV watchers of my generation) is that state’s relatively rain free climate. There’s not much discussion of Arizona’s particularities here or in the media more generally, but they point us towards the question of what environmental conditions are required for the self-driving car’s successful operation.

Hawkins very helpfully introduces us to the infrastructure of sensor technologies that make the autonomous vehicle possible (the car’s sensor view is live streamed for the passenger, in part presumably to make the ride less boring). As we watch we begin to get a sense of how the car/environment might be a more apt unit of analysis than the car alone. Surrounding vehicles and pedestrians are rendered as categorically color-coded, edge-detected objects. As Hawkins compares the experience to “being in the back seat with a very cautious student driver,” we get to sit through an “unprotected left turn” (what we human drivers would call turning left mid-block onto a side street, by waiting for a break in oncoming traffic). We see how the Waymo One turns only when the change in the traffic light at the intersection ahead creates a clear, clean break in the traffic. Well worth the wait, I suspect most of us would say, though a source of reported frustration for other human drivers. For Waymo this breakdown in driving tempo poses the challenge of developing its software to enable the car to drive “more organically, more like a human.” We get a sense here, for better and worse, of the difference between an operation based entirely on metrics and algorithms, and a practice based on embodied experiences of space and time. Nonetheless, Daniel Chu, Director of Product from Waymo, translates aggregated time on the road and associated statistics into a characterization of each Waymo One vehicle as equivalent to “the world’s most experienced driver.”

Perhaps the most welcome moment in Hawkin’s account comes when he turns to the question of whether the car is actually the most imaginative, or even desirable, vehicle for the future of transportation. Millennials, he reports, indicate in poll data some doubt about the future of car travel, and a preference for better public transportation, along with safer spaces in which to bike and walk. While touted as a remedy to the proven fallibility of human drivers, comparable safety statistics for the driverless car aren’t really available, according to Sean Sweat of the Urban Phoenix Project, given the relative size of data sets on cars driven by humans and driverless cars over time. Sweat points out that the question of driver safety also sidesteps the question of how the design of urban spaces, particularly streets, might contribute to pedestrian fatalities or, alternatively, to their avoidance. This points to the much larger issue of how the investment in a future of self-driving cars might drive the reconfiguration of transport infrastructures required to enable them. Not only the cars themselves, but our roadways and urban landscapes will likely become further instrumented in the service of vehicle autonomy. This isn’t inherently a bad thing; the Copenhagen subway system, for example, has evolved through a thoroughgoing makeover of the city infrastructure to create a driverless and extremely safe transport system to accompany its bicycle-friendly streetscape (most obviously, there’s no open access to the track, even from the station platform). But in car cultures the financial expense required to re-engineer highways and cities in order to make them autonomous vehicle friendly is accompanied by lost opportunity costs, beginning with a sidelining of discussion about alternative possibilities. Meanwhile the future of autonomous cars that can drive any road, under any conditions, may take decades, Hawkins concludes, or may never happen. Far from inevitable, then, the driverless car is a project urgently in need of braking, to open a space for more innovative ways of thinking about safe and sustainable transport.

Just-so stories

Alerted that BBC News/Technology has developed a story titled ‘Intelligent Machines: The Truth Behind AI Fiction’, I follow the link with some hopeful anticipation. The piece opens: ‘Over the next week, the BBC will be looking into all aspects of artificial intelligence – from how to build a thinking machine, to the ethics of doing so, to questions about whether an AI can ever be creative.’  But as I read on my state changes to one that my English friends would characterize as gobsmacked.  Instead of in-depth, critical journalism this piece reads like a (somewhat patronizing) children’s primer with corporate sponsorship.  We’re told, for example, that Watson, IBM’s supercomputer ‘can understand natural language and read millions of documents in seconds’.  But if it’s a deeper understanding of the state of the art in AI that we’re after, we can’t let terms like ‘understand’  and ‘read’ go by unremarked. Rather, it’s precisely the translation of computational processes as ‘understanding’ or ‘reading’, and the difference lost in that translation from our understanding and reading of those terms, that needs to be illuminated.  We might then fully appreciate the ingenious programming that enables the system singularized as ‘Watson’ to compete successfully on the televised quiz show Jeopardy, despite the machine’s cluelessness regarding the cultural references that its algorithms and databases encode.

Things go from bad to worse, however, when we’re told that Watson ‘is currently working in harmony with humans, in diverse fields such as the research and development departments of big companies such as Proctor and Gamble and Coca-Cola – helping them find new products’.  Why equate harmonious working relations with the  deployment of an IBM supercomputer in the service of corporate R&D?  And what kinds of ongoing labours of code development and maintenance are required to reconfigure a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor in such a way that it can operate usefully within these enterprises?  The anthropomorphism of Watson obfuscates, rather than explicates, these ‘truths’ about artificial intelligence and its agencies.

The structure of the story is a series of loops between fiction and ‘fact’, moving from blockbuster films to just-so stories. In place of the Terminator, we’re told, ‘The US military unit Darpa [sic] is developing lots of robotic kit, such as exoskeletons to give soldiers superhuman strength and access to visual displays that will help their decision making. It is also using Atlas robots, developed by Boston Dynamics, intended for search and rescue.’ (There is a brief mention of the campaign against lethal autonomous weapons, though with no links provided).  After a reference to C-3PO, we’re told that ‘In the real world, companion robots are really starting to take off’, exemplified by Pepper, which ‘has learnt about human emotions by watching videos showing facial expressions.’ (See my earlier post on companion robots here.) From Wall-E, surely among the most endearing of fictional robots (see Vivian Sobchack’s brilliant analysis) we go to Roomba, about which we’re told that ‘[a]necdotal evidence suggests some people become as attached to them as pets and take them on holiday.’ We finally close (not a moment too soon) with Ex Machina’s AVA on one hand, and roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro’s humanoid twin on the other, along with the assurance by Prof Chetan Dube, chief executive of software firm IPsoft, that his virtual assistant Amelia ‘will be given human form indistinguishable from the real thing at some point this decade.’

In the absence of any indication that this story is part of a paid advertisement, I’m at a loss to explain how it achieved the status of investigative journalism within the context of a news source like the BBC. If this is what counts as thoughtful reporting, the prospects for AI-based replication are promising indeed.

On killer robots, celebrity scientists, and the campaign to ban lethal autonomous weapons

Screencap of South Korean autonomous weapon in action courtesy of Richard Anders via YouTube.  Reticle added by Curiousmatic.

Amidst endless screen shots from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Warner Bros Pictures, 2003), and seemingly obligatory invocations of Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak as signatories, the media reported the release on 28 July of an open letter signed by thousands of robotics and AI researchers calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons. The letter’s release to the press was timed to coincide with the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015) in Buenos Aires. Far more significant than the inclusion of celebrity signatories – their stunning effect in drawing international media attention notwithstanding – is the number of prominent computer scientists (not a group prone to add their names to political calls to action) who have been moved to endorse the letter. Consistent with this combination of noise and signal, the commentaries generated by the occasion of the letter’s release range from aggravatingly misleading to helpfully illuminating.

The former category is well represented in an interview by Fox News’ Shepard Smith with theoretical physicist and media scientist Michio Kaku. In response to Smith’s opening question regarding whether or not concerns about autonomous weapons are overblown, Kaku suggests that “Hollywood has us brainwashed” into thinking that Terminator-style robots are just around the corner. Quite the contrary, he assures us, “we have a long ways to go before we have sentient robots on the battlefield.” This ‘long ways to go’ is typical of futurist hedges that, while seemingly interrupting narratives of the imminent rise of the machines, implicitly endorse the assumption of continuing progress in that direction. Kaku then further affirms the possibility, if not inevitability, of the humanoid weapon: “Now, the bad news of course is that once we do have such robots, these autonomous killing machines could be a game changer.” Having effectively clarified that his complaint with Hollywood is less the figure of the Terminator-style robot than its timeline, he reassures us that “the good news is, they’re decades away. We have plenty of time to deal with this threat.” “Decades away, for sure?” asks Shepard Smith. “Not for sure, cuz we don’t know how progress is,” Kaku replies, and then offers what could be a more fundamental critique of the sentient robot project. Citing the disappointments of the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge as evidence, he explains: “It turns out that our brain is not really a digital computer.” The lesson to take from this, he proposes, is that the autonomous killing machine “is a long term threat, it’s a threat that we have time to digest and deal with, rather than running to the hills like a headless chicken” (at which he and Shepard share a laugh). While I applaud Kaku’s scepticism regarding advances in humanoid robots, it’s puzzling that he himself frames the question in these terms, suggesting that it’s the prospect of humanoid killer robots to which the open letter is addressed, and (at least implicitly) dismissing its signatories as the progeny of Chicken Little.

Having by now spent all but 30 seconds of his 3 minutes and 44, Kaku then points out that “one day we may have a drone that can seek out human targets and just kill them indiscriminately. That could be a danger, a drone that’s only mission is to kill anything that resembles a human form … so that is potentially a problem – it doesn’t require that much artificial intelligence for a robot to simply identify a human form, and zap it.” Setting aside the hyperbolic reference to indiscriminate targeting of any human form (though see the Super Aegis 2 system projected to patrol the heavily armed ‘demilitarized zone’ between North and South Korea), this final sentence (after which the interview concludes) begins to acknowledge the actual concerns behind the urgency of the campaign for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons. Those turn not on the prospect of a Terminator-style humanoid or ‘sentient’ bot, but on the much more mundane progression of increasing automation in military weapon systems: in this case, automation of the identification of particular categories of humans (those in a designated area, or who fit a specified and machine-readable profile) as legitimate targets for killing. In fact, it’s only the popular media that have raised the prospect of fully intelligent humanoid robots: the letter, and the wider campaign for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons, has nothing to do with ‘Terminator-style’ robots. The developments that are cited in the letter are both far more specific, and more imminent.

That specificity is clarified in a CNET story about the open letter produced by Luke Westaway, broadcast on July 27^th. Despite its inclusion of cuts from Terminator 3 and its invocation of the celebrity triad, we’re also informed that the open letter defines autonomous weapons as those that “select and engage targets without human intervention.” The story features interviews with ICRAC’s Noel Sharkey, and Thomas Nash of the UK NGO Article 36. Sharkey helpfully points out that rather than assuming humanoid form, lethal autonomous weapons are much more likely to look like already-existing weapons systems, including tanks, battle ships and jet fighters. He explains that the core issue for the campaign is an international ban that would pre-empt the delegation of ‘decisions’ to kill to machines. It’s worth noting that the word ‘decision’ in this context needs to be read without the connotations of that term that associate it with human deliberation. A crucial issue here – and one that could be much more systematically highlighted in my view – is that this delegation of ‘the decision to kill’ presupposes the specification, in a computationally tractable way, of algorithms for the discriminatory identification of a legitimate target. The latter, under the Rules of Engagement, International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions, is an opponent that is engaged in combat and poses an ‘imminent threat’. We have ample evidence for the increasing uncertainties involved in differentiating combatants from non-combatants under contemporary conditions of war fighting (even apart from crucial contests over the legitimacy of targeting protocols). The premise that legitimate target identification could be rendered sufficiently unambiguous to be automated reliably is at this point unfounded (apart from certain nonhuman targets like incoming missiles with very specific ‘signatures’, which also clearly pose an imminent threat).

‘Do we want to live in a world in which we have given machines the power to take human lives, without a human being there to pull the trigger?’ asks Thomas Nash of Article 36 (CNET 27 July 2015)? Of course the individual human with their hand on the trigger is effectively dis-integrated – or better highly distributed – in the case of advanced weapon systems. But the existing regulatory apparatus that comprises the laws of war relies fundamentally on the possibility of assigning moral and legal responsibility. However partial and fragile its reach, this regime is our best current hope for articulating limits on killing. The precedent for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons lies in the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), the body created ‘to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately.’  Achieving that kind of legally binding international agreement, as Westaway points out, is a huge task but as Thomas Nash explains there is some progress. Since the launch of the campaign in 2013, the CCW has put the debate on lethal autonomous weapons onto its agenda and held two international ‘expert’ consultations. At the end of this year, the CCW will consider whether to continue discussions, or to move forwards on the negotiation of an international treaty.

Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, May 2014

To appreciate the urgency of interventions into the development of lethal autonomous weapons, science and technology studies (STS) offers a useful concept. The idea of ‘irreversibility’ points to the observation that, while technological trajectories are never self-determining or inevitable, the difficulties of undoing technological projects increase over time. (See for example Callon, Michel (1990), Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. The Sociological Review, 38: 132–161) Investments (both financial and political) increase as does the iterative installation and institutionalization of associated infrastructures (both material and social). The investments required to dismantle established systems grow commensurately. In the CNET interview, Nash points to the entrenched and expanding infrastructures of drone technology as a case in point.

BBC World News (after invoking the Big Three, and also offering the obligatory reference to The Terminator) interviews Professor Heather Roff who helped to draft the letter. The BBC’s Dominic Laurie asks Roff to clarify the difference between a remotely-operated drone, and the class of weapons to which the letter is addressed. Roff points to the fact that the targets for current drone operations are ‘vetted and checked’, in the case of the US military by a Judge Advocate General (JAG). She is quick to add, “Now, whether or not that was an appropriate target or that there are friendly fire issues or there are collateral killings is a completely different matter”; what matters for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons, she emphasizes, is that “there is a human being actually making that decision, and there is a locus of responsibility and accountability that we can place on that human.” In the case of lethal autonomous weapons, she argues, human control is lacking “in any meaningful sense”.

The question of ‘meaningful human control’ has become central to debates about lethal autonomous weapons. As formulated by Article 36 and embraced by United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns, it is precisely the ambiguity of the phrase that works to open up the discussion in vital and generative ways. In collaboration with Article 36, Roff is now beginning a project – funded by the Future of Life Institute – to develop the concept of meaningful human control more fully. The project aims to create a dataset “of existing and emerging semi-autonomous weapons, to examine how autonomous functions are already being deployed and how human control is maintained. The project will also bring together a range of actors including computer scientists, roboticists, ethicists, lawyers, diplomats and others to feed into international discussions in this area.”

While those of us engaged in thinking through STS are preoccupied with the contingent and shifting distributions of agency that comprise complex sociotechnical systems, the hope for calling central actors to account rests on the possibility of articulating relevant legal and normative frameworks. These two approaches are not, in my view, incommensurable. Jutta Weber and I have recently attempted to set out a conception of human-machine autonomies that recognizes the inseparability of human and machine agencies, and the always contingent nature of ideas of autonomy, in a way that supports the campaign against lethal autonomous weapons. Like the signatories to the open letter, and as part of a broader concern to interrupt the intensification of automated killing, we write of the urgent need to reinstate human deliberation at the heart of matters of life and death.

 

Slow robots and slippery rhetorics

The recently concluded DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), held this past week at a NASCAR racetrack near Homestead, Florida, seems to have had a refreshingly sobering effect on the media coverage of advances in robotics.  A field of sixteen competitors, the victors of earlier trials (it was to be seventeen, but ‘travel issues’ prevented the Chinese team from participating), the teams represented the state of the art internationally in the development of mobile, and more specifically ‘legged’ robots.  The majority of the teams worked with machines configured as upright, bipedal humanoids, while two figured their robots as primates (Robosimian and CHIMP), and one as a non-anthropomorphised ‘hexapod’. The Challenge staged a real-time, public demonstration of the state of the art; one which, it seems, proved disillusioning to many who witnessed it.  For all but the most technically knowledgeable in the audience, the actual engineering achievements were hard to appreciate.  More clearly evident was the slowness and clumsiness of the robots, and their vulnerability to failure at what to human contenders would have proven quite unremarkable tasks.  A photo gallery titled Robots to the Rescue, Slowly is indicative, and the BBC titles its coverage of the Challenge Robot competition reveals rise of the machines not imminent.

Reporter Zachary Fagenson sets the scene with a representative moment in the competition:

As a squat, red and black robot nicknamed CHIMP gingerly pushed open a spring-loaded door a gust of wind swooped down onto the track at the Homestead-Miami Speedway and slammed the door shut, eliciting a collective sigh of disappointment from the audience.

In the BBC’s video coverage of the event, Dennis Hong, Director of the Virginia Tech Robotics Lab, tells the interviewer: “When many people think about robots, they watch so many science fiction movies, they think that robots can run and do all the things that humans can do.  From this competition you’ll actually see that that is not the truth. The robots will fall, it’s gonna be really, really slow…” and DARPA Director Arati Prabhaker concurs “I think that robotics is an area where our imaginations have run way ahead of where the technology actually is, and this challenge is not about science fiction it’s about science fact.”  While many aspects of the competition would challenge the separateness of fiction and fact (not least the investment of its funders and competitors in figuring robots as humanoids), this is nonetheless a difference that matters.

These cautionary messages are contradicted, however, in a whip-lash inducing moment at the close of the BBC clip, when Boston Dynamics Project Manager Joe Bondaryk makes the canonical analogy between the trials and the Wright brothers’ first flight, reassuring us that “If all this keeps going, then we can imagine having robots by 2015 that will, you know, that will help our firefighters, help our policemen to do their jobs” (just one year after next year’s Finals, and a short time frame even compared to the remarkable history of flight).

The winning team, University of Tokyo’s spin-out company Schaft (recently acquired by Google), attributes their differentiating edge in the competition to a new high-voltage liquid-cooled motor technology making use of a capacitor rather than a battery for power, which the engineers say lets the robot’s arms move and pivot at higher speeds than would otherwise be possible. Second and fourth place went to teams that had adopted the Boston Dynamics (another recent Google acquisition) Atlas robot as their hardware platform, the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) and MIT teams respectively. (With much fanfare, DARPA funded the delivery of Atlas robots to a number of the contenders earlier this year.)  Third place went to Carnegie Mellon University’s ‘CHIMP,’ while one of the least successful entrants, scoring zero points, was NASA’s ‘Valkyrie’, described in media reports as the only gendered robot in the group (as signaled  by its white plastic vinyl body and suggestive bulges in the ‘chest’ area).  Asked about the logic of Valkyrie’s form factor, Christopher McQuin, Nasa’s chief engineer for hardware development, offered: “The goal is to make it comfortable for people to work with and to touch.”  (To adequately read this comment, and Valkyrie’s identification as gendered against the ‘neutrality’ of the other competitors, would require its own post.)  The eight teams with the highest scores are eligible to apply for up to $1-million in funding to prepare for the final round of the Challenge in late 2014, where a winner will take a $2-million prize.

An article on the Challenge in the MIT Technology Review  by journalist Will Knight includes the sidebar: ‘Why it Matters: If they can become nimbler, more dexterous, and safer, robots could transform the way we work and live.’  Knight thereby implies that we should care about robots, their actual clumsiness and unwieldiness notwithstanding, because if they were like us, they could transform our lives.  The invocation of the way we live here echos the orientation of the Challenge overall, away from robots  as weapons – as instruments of death – and towards the figure of the first responder as the preserver of life.  Despite its sponsorship by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency charged with developing new technology for the military, the Challenge is framed not in terms of military R&D, but as an exercise in the development of ‘rescue robots‘.

More specifically, DARPA statements, as well as media reports, position the Challenge itself, along with the eight tasks assigned to the robotics teams (e.g. walking over rubble, clearing debris, punching a hole in a drywall, turning a valve, attaching a fire hose, climbing a ladder), as a response to the disastrous melt down of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant.  (For a challenge to this logic see Maggie Mort’s comment to my earlier post ‘will we be rescued?’)  While this begs the question of how robots would be hardened against the effects of nuclear radiation and at what cost (the robots competing in the challenge already costing up to several million dollars each), Knight suggests that if robots can be developed that are capable of taking on these tasks, “they could also be useful for much more than just rescue missions.”  Knight observes that the robot of the winning team “is the culmination of many years of research in Japan, inspired in large part by concerns over the country’s rapidly aging population,” a proposition affirmed by DARPA Program Manager Gill Pratt who “believes that home help is the big business opportunity [for] humanoid robots.”  Just what the connection might be between these pieces of heavy machinery and care at home is left to our imaginations, but quite remarkably Pratt further suggests “that the challenges faced by the robots involved in the DARPA event are quite similar to those that would be faced in hospitals and nursing homes.”

In an article by Pratt published early in December in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled Robot to the Rescue, we catch a further glimpse of what the ‘more than rescue’ applications for the Challenge robots might be.  Pratt’s aspirations for the DARPA Robotics Challenge invoke the familiar (though highly misleading) analogy between the robot and the developing human: “by the time of the DRC Finals, DARPA hopes the competing robots will demonstrate the mobility and dexterity competence of a 2-year-old child, in particular the ability to execute autonomous, short tasks such as ‘clear out the debris in front of you’ or ‘close the valve,’ regardless of outdoor lighting conditions and other variations.”  I would challenge this comparison on the basis that it underestimates the level of the 2 year old child’s competencies, but I suspect that many parents of 2 year olds might question its aptness on other grounds as well.

Having set out the motivation and conditions of the Challenge, in a section titled ‘Don’t be scared of the robot’ Pratt  turns to the “broad moral, ethical, and societal questions” that it raises, noting that “although the DRC will not develop lethal or fully autonomous systems, some of the technology being developed in the competition may eventually be used in such systems.”  He continues:

society is now wrestling with moral and ethical issues raised by remotely operated unmanned aerial vehicles that enable reconnaissance and projection of lethal force from a great distance … the tempo of modern warfare is escalating, generating a need for systems that can respond faster than human reflexes. The Defense Department has considered the most responsible way to develop autonomous technology, issuing a directive in November 2012 that carefully regulates the way robotic autonomy is developed and used in weapons systems. Even though DRC robots may look like those in the movies that are both lethal and autonomous, in fact they are neither.

The slippery slope of automation and autonomy in military systems, and the U.S. Defense Department’s ambiguous assurances about their commitment to the continued role of humans in targeting and killing, are the topic of ongoing debate and a growing campaign to ban lethal autonomous weapons (See ICRAC website for details.)  I would simply note here the moment of tautological reasoning wherein ‘the tempo of modern warfare,’ presented as a naturally occurring state of the world, becomes the problem for which faster response is the solution, which in turn justifies the need for automation, which in turn increases the tempo, which in turn, etc.

In elaborating the motivation for the Challenge, Gill Pratt invokes a grab-bag of familiar specters of an increasingly ‘vulnerable society’ (population explosion with disproportionate numbers of frail elderly, climate change, weapons of mass destruction held in the wrong hands) as calling for, if not a technological solution, at least a broad mandate for robotics research and development:

The world’s population is continuing to grow and move to cities situated along flood-prone coasts. The population over age 65 in the United States is forecast to increase from 13 percent to 20 percent by 2030, and the elderly require more help in emergency situations. Climate change and the growing threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to non-state actors add to the concern. Today’s natural, man-made and mixed disasters might be only modest warnings of how vulnerable society is becoming.

One implication of this enumeration is that even disaster can be good for business, and humanoid robotics research, Pratt assures us, is all about saving lives and protecting humans (a term that seems all-encompassing at the same time that it erases from view how differently actual persons are valued in the rhetorics of ‘Homeland Security’).  The figure of the ‘warfighter’ appears only once towards the end of Pratt’s piece, and even there the robot’s role in the military is about preserving, not taking life.  But many of us are not reassured by the prospect of robot rescue, and would instead call on the U.S. Government to take action to mitigate climate change, to dial down its commitment to militarism along with its leading role in the international arms trade, and to invest in programs to provide meaningful jobs at a living wage to humans, not least those engaged in the work of care.  The robot Challenge could truly be an advance if the spectacle of slow robots would raise questions about the future of humanoid robotics as a project for our governments and universities to be invested in, and about the good faith of slippery rhetorics that promise the robot first responder as the remedy for our collective vulnerability.