Kate Darling

I love that.

I like that you mentioned magic because that also... Well, so first of all, I don't define robot definitively in the book because there is no definition that everyone agrees on.

And if you look back through time...

People have called things robots until they lose the magic because they're more ubiquitous.

Like a vending machine used to be called a robot and now it's not, right?

So I do agree with you that there's this magic aspect, which is how people understand robots.

If you ask a roboticist, they have the definition of something that is, well, it has to be physical.

Usually it's not an AI agent.

It has to be embodied.

They'll say it has to be able to sense its environment in some way.

It has to be able to make a decision autonomously and then act on its environment again.

And I think that's a pretty good technical definition, even though it really breaks down when you come to things like the smartphone, because the smartphone can do all of those things.

And most robotists would not call it a robot.

So there's really no one good definition.

But part of why I wrote the book is because...

People have a definition of robot in their minds that is usually very focused on a comparison of robots to humans.

So if you Google image search robot, you get a bunch of humanoid robots, robots with a torso and head and two arms and two legs.

And that's the definition of robot that I'm trying to get us away from because I think that it trips us up a lot.

Well, because this constant comparison of robots to people, artificial intelligence to human intelligence, first of all, it doesn't make sense from a technical perspective because

you know, the early AI researchers, some of them were trying to recreate human intelligence.