Robot

Robot is human-created object that can perform some of complicated human functions in the automatic regime.

In centuries 20–21, robots are usually realized either as a programs that in some cases behave as a human, or as electro–mechanical ensembles of actuators driven by a computer. Some of them are shaped as dolls.

Often the term "robot" is applied to a computer-driven device, that can perform some action of a human hand; usually, manufacturing or ensambling of some goods. The robot that can perform some movement similar to human hand by signals from the microchip incorporated to the human body is reported by Washington Post .

Up to beginning of century 21, no one robot is reported to be able to built-up, or at least to assemble from elements a device similar to itself.

Pretensions of the robot-creators

In science-fiction, robots are perform complicated operations and do some important job. The advertisement of the companies that produce robots often pretend that their robots can perform some functions, described in science-fiction.

Abilities of robots

In the most of cases, the abilities of robots are greatly exaggerated. Up to year 2012, the robots cannot perform even elementary operations in the area of activity they were expected to be especially useful.

At the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and then at the Fukushima disaster in 2011, there were a lot of expectations that the robots can make some of the danger human job. Practically, robots happened almost useless. The suicide human workers were sent instead of robots to deliver water to the nuclear reactors with broken system of cooling. In the case of Chernobyl, this could be attributed to the bad will of the Soviet veterans. (First, the accident was not grave, but the administrators had sent soldiers to collect the active rods into a heap, to allow the decay heat to burn-up the most of the nuclear fuel into the atmosphere.)

In the case of of the Fukushima disaster, it is dificult to suspect the administration in the intentional sabotage, and the failure of robots should be attributed to their design that is aimed to the advertisement and show-business rather than to any other practical activity. The journalists try to understand: why the country (which is most advanced in the industry of robots) had to send the workers-kamikaze to cool the reactors, instead of to send robots . According to publications, no one robot took part in the cooling of the reactor, although some attempts to use a robot for the automatic registration of radiation are discussed .

Up to year 2012 there are no robots for the software installalling; the loading and configuring takes a lot of time from the user; often, the slide projector and the computer cannot find the common language, the printer cannot understand that the user wants to print something, and so on; at the manual configurations of a software, the most of combinations of the options lead to completely non–workable setting. Often the workable configuration remains hidden and lost in the exponentially–huge amount of multi-level menues and multitude of accessorial options.

Looking at the poor performance of robots, one may think, that the development goes by a wrong way, and the attempts of creation of human-like robots should be repeated almost since the beginning.