Revisioning HRI given exponential technological growth

Sometimes it's said that the technical problems in robotics are harder and more intransigent than the field ever expected decades ago. That's often the preamble to the sort of statement: “And those of us in HRI need to be realistic about what robots actually will be able to do in the near future.” This panel explores the idea that that view - of slow technological growth - is fundamentally wrong. Our springboard is Ray Kurzweil's idea from his book The Singularity is Near. He argues that our minds think in linear terms while the technological change is increasing exponentially. To illustrate exponential growth, take a dollar and double it every day. After a week, you have $64, which is hardly much to shout about. After a month you have over a billion dollars. Kurzweil shows that we're at the “knee” of that exponential curve, where technological growth has begun to accelerate at an increasingly astonishing rate. Given this proposition, the panelists discuss how we should be revisioning the field of HRI.