"Living With Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know" by Ruth Aylett and Patricia Vargas

Put aside your fears about a robotic uprising, says Ruth Aylett, a computer science professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a robotics researcher for 30 years. Talking with Steve Tarter, she emphasized that robots, whatever you may have heard to the contrary, are machines, made and controlled by man."Forget the hype and the unrealistic speculations about so-called new species or superhuman abilities, and let's work together as roboticists and as citizens to apply this fascinating and challenging technology where it will do some good," she notes.The book jacket suggests we look at robots as human-made artifacts rather than placeholders for our anxieties, something that Aylett said comes easily to the general public."Human beings are wired to react to things that look as if they have some degree of autonomy as if they were social beings. If something with movement looks even vaguely humanoid, people will assume it has human capabilities," she said.Aylett puts robots alongside cars, planes and washing machines as tools that people merely use in daily life.The fact is that the task of fashioning a robot to walk upright is difficult, she said.  Designing a robotic arm to do just a few of the things a human arm can do is a huge challenge, said Aylett.Youngsters engaged in making robots for competitions get a clear understanding of the difficulty involved in getting robots to do what you want, she said. As for the science fiction side of the equation, Aylett said she enjoys reading sci-fi. But when it comes to movies, she points to the fact that, through three  generations of filmmaking, "no film has ever used a real robot."First, actors wore costumes to play robots like R2D2, said Aylett. A second generation of films like Short Circuit relied on puppeteers while the third generation, which we're in now, involves post-production wizardry, she said.