Wired.co.uk: What did you make of Google’s autonomous car project? Is Google going to become a competitor?
Colin Angle: Larry Page is passionate about robots. I know Larry. He’s a robot geek. He has a Roomba. I went to his wedding and the first DARPA Grand Challenge with him. He’s an excited, visionary thinker. Put an excited visionary thinker with arbitrary wealth and access to great other minds and exciting interesting things happen. Did Google need to make robot cars in order to make Streetview work? Absolutely not. It’s the equivalent of saying you need an walking robot in order to push an upright vacuum cleaner. It’s gratuitous robotics!

People often speculate about robot intelligence as a frightening thing. How do you see that?
People ask me if I’m worried about robots taking over, I say: absolutely not. People taking robot and sensing technology and incorporating them into their own bodies is much more imminent. We already do cochlea implants for the hard of hearing and neural implants for eyes [that] allow people to regain some perception of light. What happens when you can elective surgery to replace your eyeballs to give your AR-vision? Would you take out your perfectly good eye to do it? Not today. But maybe in 20 years. That creates real questions about morality and the expansion of the gulf between haves and have nots. But all of those upgrades are easier than trying to make a robot with a human level intelligence.

Will we develop robots that can compete with humans in terms of intellect? Is Ray Kurzweil right when he talks up the concept of the singularity?
Ray Kurzweil is wrong when it comes to timeframe. Nothing has moved fast in the robot industry. We’ll see an acceleration as new players enter it but if you look at the level of complexity required, it’s incredibly daunting. 10 years is a heartbeat. iRobot has been pushing the envelope for 20 years. If you’d asked me when I’d started how long it would take to make Roomba, my answer would have been next year, not 12 years from now.

What about the sci-fi vision of android servants? Is C3PO waiting for us in the future?
We will not have humanoid androids. It’s interesting: when you start trying to make robots look more human, you end up making them look more grotesque. It takes very little to go from super-attractive robot to hideous robot. When we built Roomba, we explicitly designed it to not have a face. We didn’t want to think it was cute, we wanted people to take it seriously so we gave it more of an industrial look. ??People personified their Roomba anyway. Over 80 percent of people name their robot. We did nothing to encourage people to do that but they do it anyway. You don’t have to try, you just have to make the robot useful and mobile. There is a moment when Roomba stops being a robot and starts being part of the family.

We’re going to have robots in the home but they’re not going to be walking. Legs are complicated, unreliable and costly. Robots are going to look and be designed to meet the function they’re supposed to perform. People will still name them and connect with them.

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Authors: Mic Wright

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