How Much Initiative Should a Service Robot Have?
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new novel Service Model humorously imagines a robot Jeeves coping with the end of the civilization and illustrates the four levels of initiative in autonomous robots. Click here for the Science Robotics article discussing robot initiative.
Buy Service Model from Amazon here, I enjoyed the audio version read by the author.
One way roboticists classify autonomy, which is very different than the SAE levels of driving automation, is by levels of initiative:
no autonomy, where the robot rigidly executes limited algorithms with no awareness of how that algorithm satisfies a task.
process autonomy, where the robot can dynamically select the appropriate algorithm or process to best satisfy its current task.
systems-state autonomy level, the robot can generate tasks needed to accomplish broader goals.
intentional autonomy level, robot initiative begins to exhibit what we would recognize as initiative in humans; it is able to modify or generate new goals to meet the spirit of mission, not blindly adhere to specific goals (e.g., it can dynamical change plays).
Does UnCharles have intentional autonomy? You'll have to read to the end of the book to find out! Science aside, Service Model is a delightful read, a call back to the P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves stories but where the robot, not the human, is the clueless one. It’s hard to find a job as a butler if it’s the end of the world! Service Model is quintessentially British: a stiff upper lip butler in a class-based society that has hit the extremes: the rich are ensconced in their estates, the poor get poorer, or preserved in a living diorama of a hellish, commuter middle-class existence that combines The Office with Kafka and Orwell. UnCharles is a clueless hero, more in The Wrong Unit vein.
My textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics MIT Press 2nd Ed, discusses this and many other taxonomies for robot autonomy.
You can view my other Science Fiction/Science Fact articles for Science Robotics behind the paywall.
If you like robot butlers, you might enjoy:
Robot Proletariat, the first in the series of the same name. It's Marx versus Asimov!
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