Have you ever relied on your smartphone's maps to get around? Asked Siri, Alexa, or Google Home to find you the best dim sum? Let a Tesla ferry you in Autopilot mode? Then you owe Shakey some thanks.
Who's Shakey? Really, it's "what's Shakey?" Shakey is the wobbly-headed robotic great-grandparent of the artificially intelligent systems taking over your digital life.
Shakey, as you'll see in the first installment of our video series on the rise of AI, was the first autonomous, reasoning, mobile robot. Shakey, which was developed at SRI, started rolling around in 1966, about a decade after computer scientists started talking about "artificial intelligence" as something within the realm of technical possibility. In those days, computers still took up entire rooms. At the same time, the most rudimentary robots had started to take over human tasks in factories, catalyzing a now-familiar conversation: Are these technologies going to help us or replace us?
That's the big question today as Shakey's offspring—from Roombas to robo-trucks—make massive technical strides. We'll explore what the future of AI and automation may bring—and what their rise means for us humans—in our six-part series, "Robots & Us." It could be a shaky ride.
