What Happens When Your Bomb-Defusing Robot Becomes a Weapon

Nearly 20 years earlier, a young roboticist named Helen Greiner was lecturing at a tech company in Boston. Standing in front of the small crowd, Greiner would have been in her late 20s, with hooded eyes, blonde hair, and a faint British accent masked by a lisp. She was showing off videos of Pebbles, a bright-blue robot built out of sheet metal. For many years, the field of AI struggled with a key problem: How do you make robots for the real world? A robot that followed a script was simple; but to handle the unforeseen (say, a pothole or a fence), programmers would have to code instructions for every imaginable scenario.