What a difference three decades makes. It’s the year 2050 and the cities of 30 years before are unrecognizable. Technology has been embedded into the heart of every thriving metropolis: from Mumbai, Lagos, and Ankara to London, Singapore, and Sydney, silicon rules. Take a flight over any city and you’ll see the metal glisten, the green parks breathe, and the flash of sheer human progress dazzle below.
Electric autonomous flying vehicles transport people from A to B, almost any surface can be transformed into an interactive playground for work or leisure, and homes revolve around their inhabitants — cooking meals on demand, adapting the environment for every mood, and improving and safeguarding the health of the whole family. Spaceships are mining asteroids, geo-engineering has slowed down climate change, and scientific advancements in health have vastly accelerated; now, quantum computers are commonplace.
Factories, large or small, are working on overdrive to address individuals’ unique needs — every home, car, instrument, device, and rocket has to be created with perfect precision, and at a rate which keeps up with this richer, more connected world’s demand. Intelligent machines are the workers of this modern industrial era — building, recycling, repairing, and powering our planet.
But their learning is limited: these machines cannot think — not quite like a human —and their ingenuity is limited to the tasks they’ve been assigned. They can strike and assemble and build and lift and craft and ship, but they can only keep up with the world humans have designed, not advance it. They are the executors of someone else’s vision.
Enter the Robotics Research Scientist
They are the experts in designing, building, and evolving the working machines behind our world — the curious ones, the detail-oriented ones, the ones with the questions, the ones with deep technological expertize, paired with an ability to see the problem needing to be solved as a whole.
Every robot needs to be designed. There’s deciding what the physical hardware should look like — whether a pincer or a belt or a forklift is needed, in which order each movement needs to be performed to build the product, and which materials are best fit for purpose. Then there’s thinking about the software — writing down every task in the simplest computer-speak — ‘if this then that’ — and translating the images and speech of the human world into code robots can understand.
Without Robotics Research Scientists, the technology behind the robotic task force that enables the evolution of our advanced society doesn’t exist. There’s thinking about how to get multiple robots to work together, how to have them learn tasks themselves without lines and lines of code to refer to, and how to teach the machines to respond to almost any problem they might encounter.
They also work out how robots and humans should best interact. Is the relationship a subservient one? Should a new language we can both speak be taught? Does the robot have a life-saving responsibility beyond its mechanical tasks?
We’ve had forms of artificial intelligence for a long time now, and even in 2050 they must still be improved and repaired and managed. The Robot Research Scientist is doing the thinking about robots’ role in the world — especially as they cannot, yet, do it for themselves.
Illustration: Matthew Hollister
