Robots can play a major role in the service industries. And it is in that direction that robotics needs to turn, Joseph Engleberger asserts, not toward the routine factory jobs of the past. Engleberger was instrumental in founding the robotics industry and his book Robotics in Practice is now a classic. In Robotics in Service he observes that the time is ripe for robotics to launch itself into an entirely new marketplace. Engelberger's starting point is the fact that it is now feasible to equip robots with a wide repertoire of senses and to provide them with at least rudimentary intelligence. We can produce a range of robotic devices that can be put to work performing a variety of services that have become increasingly unattractive to the human labor force because of their mundane nature or the dangers they involve. Part I of the book provides a robotics technology update, concentrating on the new developments, particularly in sensory equipment and artificial intelligence. Part II examines in detail 15 specific applications -- ranging from commercial cleaning and fast food service to jobs in space and aid for the handicapped and the elderly -- that are ripe for exploitation.
THE REAL THING by Isaac Asimov Back in 1939, when I was still a teenager, I began to write (and publish) a series of stories about robots which, for the first time in science fiction, were pictured as having been deliberately engineered to do their job safely. They were not intended to be creaky Gothic menaces, nor outlets for mawkish sentiment. They were simply well-designed machines. Beginning in 1942, I crystallized this notion in what I called 'The Three Laws of Robotics' and, in 1950, nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, I, Robot. I did not at that time seriously believe that I would live to see robots in action and robotics becoming a booming industry .... Yet here we are, better yet, I am alive to see it. But then, why shouldn't they be with us? Robots fulfil an important role in industry. They do simple and repetitive jobs more steadily, more reliably, and more uncomplainingly than a human being could - or should. Does a robot displace a human being? Certainly, but he does so at a job that, simply because a robot can do it, is beneath the dignity of a human being; a job that is no more than mindless drudgery. Better and more human jobs can be found for human beings - and should.
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