A Robot by Any Other Name

In the July 2017 issue of ASME’s Mechanical Engineering magazine, the editor-in-chief, John Falcioni, talked about how "robots" will become part of the fabric of our life, regardless of what we might call them. He noted that a speaker he had heard recently rejected the name "robot" for a driverless car, preferring "carbot" instead. It was interesting that inside the front cover was a photo of a little boy sitting at a table studying with his "iPal" robot.

The article brought to mind a similar debate that occurred in the early 80's when I was working for Burlington Industries in their Material Handling Group. The textile industry was then very labor intensive, and "robotics" seemed to hold a promising technology for the industry. We hired a young mechanical engineer from Ford Motor Company who had been involved in getting them into robotics. He and I shared an office, and one Friday afternoon he attended a meeting to discuss the installation of the first robotic material handling type device in one of our more modern plants.  He came back from the meeting very dejected, as the discussion was all about what to call the device. The term "robot" was not to be used as it might scare the workers into believing they would be put out of a job. He said they had the same discussion at Ford and came to the conclusion that no matter what you try to call something with AI, artificial intelligence, people are going to point at it and say, "robot!" We then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon coming up with alternative names, none of which we put down in writing. Management eventually realized a robot by any other name is still a robot.
      - Dr. Tom

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