SIME hot topic: Robotics – will the robots take over?

By Lorraine Sauvy

It has already been seen that kids using digital assistants are talking in the same commanding way to their parents. Should we be mindful about coding politeness in our future digital assistants? Yes please. And how will we feel towards a robot doing something wrong versus a human? We can already see that we have much more difficulties forgiving a machine then a human.

But whether we like it or not robots will be parts of our lives. And they already are! In many industries robots have replaced humans were the task is dangerous or just too heavy for us humans. But how about the future when we have all kinds of robots supporting us in our daily life? Our former Comprend colleague Tommie Cau challenged the audience to think about future jobs like VR opticians, memory removal surgeons, robot councillor helping to choose which robot would suit us best or big data doctors. There was also a robot on stage this year which fit this main topic well.

Image source: www.facebook.com/simeconference

The robot on stage was a so called Furhat and helped keeping the time by yelling "your time is up, human!" whenever a speaker overdrew their time. Funny, and a bit scary. After the conference I challenging my fears and went posing in with the scary Furhat on stage. Luckily, I did not get screamed at.

More on SIME 2016
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