You might expect a book titled Robot Futures and written by a robotics researcher to be a whiz-bang prophecy of technologies that are the best thing since sliced bread. Soon we’ll be living to 200 while traveling from vacation to vacation in our flying cars. All the while, robots handle all the parts of our jobs that we hated anyway, right? Maybe, but this book isn’t the place to find it. There’s plenty of speculation in it (I mean, we are talking about the future here) but it’s decidedly more pragmatic and sober than that.
The book’s author, Illah Nourbakhsh, runs Carnegie Mellon’s Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab, which “explores socially meaningful innovation and deployment of robotic technologies.” (He’s also one of the developers of the GigaPan imaging tools we highlighted recently.) The book, accompanied by Nourbakhsh’s blog of the same name, focuses on what he calls the “human side effects” of future technologies—the unexpected ways they could affect us socially and as a society.
Each chapter of the book—which progresses from the likely-seeming near future to an increasingly speculative and distant one— begins with a short, fictional story to illustrate the types of issues that could accompany a given technology. The rest of the chapter then beaks down those issues.
For example, the first chapter looks at something that might seem benign: advances in marketing. It doesn’t take much extrapolation from the present to see some pretty interesting scenarios. Marketing has undergone a data revolution online, where an unprecedented amount of information can be gathered from customers. Tools like A/B testing direct some website visitors to view a modified site, allowing providers to directly test the impacts of changes before site-wide adoption. Since this takes place automatically and provides a solid statistical analysis, it takes human judgment out of the equation to a large degree. You simply try things and let the data decide. (The book’s cover art homages the classic example of Google A/B testing 41 shades of blue.)
