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COMMUNICATIONS 223
Whoa. Don’t jump yet. Here are my disclaimers.
Nothing in my definition says the information has to arrive error free. Most infor-
mation is sent with the full knowledge that it will be corrupted some en route. TV
transmissions are surely in this category.
Nothing in my definition says information cannot also go the other way during the
same communication process. As long as information still gets from the source to
the destination, the definition holds.
I disagree that we must always ascribe motivation to the sender. Professor Schihl
must argue his positions with passion! Although some communication is certainly
useful in effecting societal change, much human communication is routine.
The source and destination can be humans or machines. For that matter, some
information is just sent to the dump, which hardly qualifies as communication.
This makes the good professor’s definition look a bit better!
Most communication (99.9 percent?) falls on deaf ears. We need only go to the
newspaper recycling plants to see this. Humans these days must be adept at tun-
ing out the flood of communications coming at them from TV, radio, email, the
Internet, and newspapers.
Ted’s expanded definition includes the communication channel and noise. These
considerations are one layer down inside my definition. We’ll get to them shortly.

So why is communications a topic in a book about robots? Well, we’ve entered an era
where communication traffic is growing rapidly. Further, the amount of data stored in
computers and data banks is growing rapidly as well. It’s increasing something like 50
percent a year if we believe the storage industry hype.
Just as communication is vital to the effectiveness and power of people, so too will
it become more important to robots. The modern employee is much more effective with
the ability to get email and surf the Internet. As robots become more capable, commu-
nications will become more important to their design. At the very least, communication
permits the remote monitoring of robots for many different purposes. To design robots
well, a robot designer should have a firm grasp of communications.
Now, given that this is the twenty-first century, we are going to confine our discus-
sion to digital communications and forgo all discussion of analog communications. True
enough, digital communications do use analog electronics, but the prevailing mode of
electronic communications today is digital. Cable TV, telephones, cell phones, and the
Internet are all digital communications.