Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

President Trump adjusts his suit jacket before bestowing the nation's highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, to retired Army medic James McCloughan during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Monday, July 31, 2017. McCloughan is credited with saving the lives of members of his platoon nearly 50 years ago in the Battle of Nui Yon Hill in Vietnam.

Is President Trump evolving into a figurehead, increasingly ignored by Congress and even some members of his own executive branch of government?

Mr. Trump retains enormous direct powers – he can deploy troops, negotiate treaties, and issue executive orders. But his record is mixed at best on the larger, more complex aspects of presidential authority, which involve developing and helping to pass legislation, or lobbying the nation directly via the bully pulpit of the Oval Office.

Following the collapse of the latest attempt to repeal Obamacare in the Senate, a few administration critics have begun resorting to the “w” word – “weak.” There’s still time to turn things around for the Trump presidency, but it is already getting late, and many angry and incorrect tweets have flowed under the metaphorical bridge. A powerful and competent chief of staff, if that’s what new hire John Kelly becomes, would be a good start, says political scientist Matt Glassman.

“A fair amount of damage is done ... but Clinton ’94 is a good road map for DJT: recognize weaknesses, bring in the right people,” says Mr. Glassman in a response to a reporter’s inquiry on social media.

Trump supporters think that if the president has fallen short of his goals it is due to the animosity of establishment Washington. The failure of Obamacare repeal lies with GOP leadership, in their view. Tax reform is still to come, and the stock market is booming. Maybe the president isn't a policy wonk, but so what? That's what he has staff for. Trump is a different kind of politician, to his voters, one who threatens incumbents.

Pushback from Congress ...

But to see why some political scientists would call Trump ineffective, look at what’s happening in Congress this week. The president has railed on Twitter that Senators will be “quitters” if they don’t redouble efforts to repeal Obamacare. His budget director has said that the Senate shouldn’t vote on anything else until they vote again on health care.

Senators are apparently treating those words as empty threats. Majority leader Mitch McConnell has outlined legislative plans leading up to the August recess, and health care isn’t in them.

Then there’s the Russia sanctions bill. In a statement, Trump excoriated that legislation on Wednesday as partially unconstitutional. Yet as he did so, he signed it into law. He effectively had no choice, since it passed the House and Senate with large majorities, which could have overridden a presidential veto.

Asked Wednesday about Trump’s criticisms of the sanctions law, Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, answered simply, “that’s fine.”

Pressed by a reporter on the president’s complaint that the sanctions law infringed on executive branch authority, Senator Corker, by now in an elevator, just shrugged his shoulders as the doors closed, ending the conversation.

... and from executive agencies

Nor are lawmakers the only officials in Washington contradicting the president. The same thing’s happening with the president’s own executive branch.

Last week the Department of Defense was put in an awkward position, and explained that transgender soldiers have not been banned from the military, as Trump had tweeted. Or at least, not yet – the White House still must draw up orders and the military must figure out how to carry them out before that happens.

As Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor, points out on the blog Lawfare, one of the most remarkable aspects of the entire Trump presidency has been the extent to which senior officials treat Trump as if he were not chief executive.

They regularly contradict his statements, whether it is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley saying that the US “absolutely” supports a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, to the many top security officials who have testified there is no evidence that President Barack Obama directed wiretapping of Trump in Trump Tower, as Trump charged.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has been quietly reassuring allies that Trump is not in fact rejecting NATO’s common defense, as he sometimes seems to do.

Overall, Trump is not a figurehead in the sense of being a stand-in for someone else, so much as someone who does not seem to understand the requirements of being president, says George Edwards III, a professor of presidential studies at Texas A&M University. He seems to view his job as primarily selling things, not helping develop legislation or even contributing core ideas much beyond a few key points, such as building a southern wall.

“We’ve got a very ill-informed, impulsive guy as president of the United States. He knows less about public policy than maybe any president ever,” says Professor Edwards.

He’s not weak in terms of using his hard power, such as rolling back Obama-era regulations, or deporting immigrants here illegally, according to Edwards. But he’s weak in regards to dealing with the other branches of the US government and the complex structure of powers woven by the Constitution.

“He’s weak more with Congress and the public,” says Edwards.

His job-approval polls aren’t good. The FiveThirtyEight poll aggregator has him at 37 percent approval and 57.5 percent disapproval, its worst numbers for him yet.

As Glassman notes, Trump’s presidency is far from failed – both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton suffered through difficult periods in terms of congressional interaction and public approval. But in one thing at least Trump is right: a few big wins of some sort on legislation would probably help.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed reporting from Capitol Hill.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Reggie Dupre, executive director of the Terrebonne Levee & Conservation District, gives a tour of the Bubba Dove Houma Navigation Canal Floodgate on May 25, 2017 in Dulac, La. The floodgate protects Terrebonne Parish from storm surges that could swamp the area.

Growing up in the small bayou town of Pointe-aux-Chenes, Reggie Dupre has always considered the residents of the neighboring Isle de Jean Charles community as something like a step-family. With only about 10 miles of bayou separating them in Terrebonne Parish, he would go to the same churches and schools as them. They even shared a voting precinct.

“The island is an extension of the Pointe-aux-Chenes community,” he says.

This is what made cutting Isle de Jean Charles out from the parish’s new expansive levee protection system – which Mr. Dupre is helping construct as head of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District – all the more painful for him.

“It’s always been for me a bit of personal dilemma that I’m the chief executive of the agency responsible for building a system that excludes the island,” he adds.

Fortunately, the predominantly Native American Isle de Jean Charles community is getting help from elsewhere: namely, in the form of a $48 million grant from the federal government to help them permanently relocate.

The grant was “a big relief” personally, Dupre says, but while the community has made international headlines as America’s first official “climate refugees,” Dupre has been shifting his focus to the host of other communities in Terrebonne Parish that are facing similar dangers and weighing the decisions that families on Isle de Jean Charles have already made: stay and adapt? Or relocate to higher ground? If they choose to relocate, how?

Residents of Louisiana are on the front lines of climate change in the United States. If sea levels continue to rise as climate models predict – by as much as five feet by 2100 – residents of coastal cities from Boston and New York to Miami and San Francisco may soon be asking themselves these same questions. And they are likely to look to Louisiana for answers. In that sense, Isle de Jean Charles has become the nation’s first test case in how to manage retreat.

“We want to learn as much as we can so other communities can do it more successfully in the future, less expensively in the future, and more efficiently in the future,” says Pat Forbes, executive director of Louisiana’s Office of Community Development (OCD), the department tasked with ensuring the relocation happens before the grant expires in 2022.

Managed retreat

Ideally, state officials want a managed retreat to check three main boxes: moving the community out of harm’s way, ensuring the community is economically sustainable in its new location, and preserving as much of the community’s culture and identity as possible.

A core difference between managed retreat and unmanaged retreat is that it allows for retaining a community’s cultural and social fabric after a relocation, which can in turn make the potentially traumatic process more bearable.

“The more we learn about resilience, it has way more to do with community cohesiveness than any infrastructure we can build,” says Mr. Forbes.

Ensuring that relocated communities are economically sustainable is perhaps the most urgent challenge, however. Crucially, state officials hope that this aspect of managed retreat could attract support from the private sector. Because if it costs $48 million to relocate 25 families, what could the cost be for larger communities?

“Like founding any new town over the course of Western history … it’s all wrapped around the idea of, ‘How do we generate revenue? How do we build an economy?’ ” says Mathew Sanders, resilience policy and program director for the OCD.

In Louisiana, that could mean fitness companies, pharmacies, and supermarkets chip in with funding in exchange for footholds in the new community, much like a city would on a new real estate development.

“Unlocking that financial [support] is something that will determine the success of [relocation] projects,” adds Mr. Sanders. “Ultimately we want to show that there would be the same amount of incentives the private sector has every time in any real estate development.”

Empire eroding

The ability to relocate whole communities en masse may help prevent what is happening to communities like Empire, La., where the permanent population has slowly declined over time – in lockstep with a decline in economic activity.

Located near the southern tip of Plaquemines Parish, the town is the second-largest commercial fishing hub in the country outside Alaska, but the population has dropped from more than 2,800 in 2000 to less than 1,000 in 2010, according to Census data.

Ann Hermes/Staff

A fisherman casts a line after work on May 26 in Empire, La. As the town's marshland has washed into the swelling Gulf of Mexico, residents of Empire have gradually moved away.

Richie Blink is one of those who left. The son of a commercial fisherman, he grew up in the waters around Empire, starting so young he had to stand on a five-gallon bucket to see over the bow of his father’s boat. He watched the marshland slowly wash away throughout his childhood, with hurricane Katrina destroying his high school months after he graduated. He now works for the National Wildlife Federation in New Orleans as a local outreach coordinator, and splits his time between the city and the house he still maintains in Empire as a weekend home.

“What does a transition look like? How does one move inland?” he asks. “I think my generation maybe is kind of stuck in the middle. I’m probably going to try and maintain a [weekend home] there as long as I’m alive, but I could see future generations not even willing to try.”

Philip Simmons has stayed in Empire, mostly so he can take care of his father, and he’s been working to secure a future elsewhere for seven years, after leaving the lucrative but unpredictable commercial fishing business for the Plaquemines Parish Ferry Department.

Relaxing in Alex’s Lounge – an ocean-blue corrugated metal box in the middle of town – one afternoon in late May, the sweat patches on his work shirt and the glaring sunburn on his round cheeks illustrate the grueling hours Mr. Simmons is working now as both a mechanic and a part-time deckhand.

“I’ve got three more years, then I’ll be invested with the parish … [and] I can draw retirement,” he says.

The state has a few projects in the works to better protect Empire, including two giant sediment diversions intended to rebuild tens of thousands of acres of land in the region.

Sediment diversions take years, however, and both Simmons and Mr. Blink want a more immediate defense: moving the town onto a large mound a dozen feet above sea level.

Left-field ideas fly through the smoky air in Alex’s Lounge. Zane Melancon, sitting next to Simmons and sipping out of a Styrofoam cup, suggests they should build a beach at a nearby marina to help boost tourism.

“But there’s no land out there no more,” Simmons replies.

Mr. Melancon eventually agrees. “It won’t take no Katrina,” he says, referring to the 2005 hurricane that thrashed the Louisiana coast. “It’ll take a little storm like [hurricane] Isaac to take this place down.” 

“If I get done like I did for Katrina I won’t be back,” Simmons says. “I’m not starting over from scratch again.”

Blink is optimistic that Empire could still avoid that fate, however.

"I have a lot of faith in the [state] that they’re going to come together and figure out how to make these really tough choices, and how to live in a better way," he says.

This report is the second installment of a four-part series. For the first installment, watch the video below. Click here for Part 3, a look at Louisiana's $50 billion master plan to protect and restore the coastline. And click here for Part 4, a window into one archaeologist's efforts to document Louisiana's coastal history before it washes away.

Elaine Thompson/AP

Demonstrators in Seattle show support for a new city income tax on the wealthy that was approved by the Seattle City Council on July 10. The city's high earners are poised to become the only Washington State residents to pay an income tax.

Ned Friend has high hopes for what Seattle’s new income tax could mean for his city.

The measure, passed by the city council in July, would impose a 2.25 percent tax on high-income – those who make above $250,000 a year, or twice that for couples.

Mr. Friend, a software engineer whose annual income is above the threshold, sees the new cash source as a way to help ease the affordability crisis that is the dark side to Seattle’s booming tech industry. He says he’s happy to pay a little extra each year if it means more revenue for the city to address homelessness and fund public education, make taxes more fair, and defend liberal Seattle against strikes from a conservative federal government.

“It shaves a little bit off my long-term investments,” Friend says, “but it makes a better city.”

In some ways, the measure is a regional issue: Seattle’s is the first income tax initiative to succeed in Washington State since its Supreme Court killed a short-lived bill in 1933.

But the policy is also emblematic of a broader trend, one in which cities with liberal leadership feel empowered to experiment with policy. From minimum wage and fair scheduling measures to plastic bag bans and sanctuary laws, cities across the nation are testing both the boundaries of local authority and the effectiveness of liberal legislation. Elected officials in blue cities – propelled by constituents like Friend, and a perception of hostility from Congress and the Trump administration – are raising income inequality, persistent poverty, and climate change to priority levels once reserved for bread-and-butter issues like infrastructure and economic development.

“We’re increasingly seeing cities attempting to engage in some sort of redistribution, pro-inclusion set of policies,” says Solomon Greene, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. “There’s a bit of an ‘us versus them’ mentality, and … there’s a sense that we need to be able to take care of our own.”

To some degree, cities have always been laboratories for policy, both liberal and conservative.  “It’s much easier to reverse a state or city law than it is to reverse a federal law,” says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank based in New York. Statewide and national challenges are often more pronounced in cities and local communities, Mr. Greene notes, and metro areas often have the resources to try new approaches to problem-solving.

A squeeze that affects politics

What appears new is that, as income inequality rises, greater swaths of local constituencies are feeling the squeeze – and local leaders are responding by shifting their focus to solutions that reflect those concerns. A Boston University report this year found that mayors more frequently mention poverty, affordability, and income disparity as top policy priorities than they did even two years ago.

There’s also been a values shift among many urban residents, Greene says. “There is a desire to live around a greater diversity of people, a celebration of racial and income diversity, diversity of nationality, and the sense that this generates innovation and a vital, thriving living environment,” he says. “There is the economics behind it, but there’s also changing preferences.”

Seattle is an apt place to experiment on liberal policy.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

Councilwoman Lisa Herbold stands by a window on July 19, 2017 at City Hall in downtown Seattle. Ms. Herbold, who represents Seattle's District 1, was among those who voted to enact an income tax on the city's highest earners early this month.'This isn't just about raising revenue,' she says. 'This is about addressing a structural unfairness in our system.'

The city is home to the “Fight for $15” movement and a liberal stronghold in a state where the Cascade mountains act as a natural divide between Republican and Democratic regions. Citizens like Friend champion a mode of thinking that celebrates individual participation in advancing a common good: “I see it as, the vibrancy that these funds will provide will make up the personal cost,” Friend says of the new income tax. “It takes our collective investment to make our city great.”

The city is also known for its income inequality and sky-high costs of living – a place where the median household income is above $80,000 but tent cities for the homeless fill public spaces. In 2014, Seattle’s wealthiest households made 19 times more than its poorest. “While Seattle’s prosperity is remarkable … the city’s rising tide didn’t lift all boats,” Gene Balk wrote for The Seattle Times that year. “You might say it only lifted the yachts.”

‘This isn't just about ... revenue’

The new income tax serves as a vehicle for city leaders’ attempt to level the playing field between rich and poor. The tax would help fund affordable housing, education, and public transit, and restore any federal funds lost through anticipated budget cuts, they say. It also begins the dismantling of what pro-poor advocates see as an outdated tax structure that places the greatest share of the tax burden on the city’s lowest-income households.

“This isn’t just about raising revenue,” says Lisa Herbold, who represents Seattle’s District 1 and chairs the council’s committee on civil rights, utilities, economic development, and the arts. “This is about addressing a structural unfairness in our system.”

Perhaps as much as anything, what’s driving cities to act is the notion that big issues aren't being addressed at higher levels, given a widening ideological gap between progressive metros and conservative states and the federal government. Since about 2014, laws intended to address systemic inequality – both economic and social – have seen a wave of municipal support that’s faced either grudging acceptance or outright resistance from Republican governors and state Legislatures. To date, 40 localities have adopted minimum wages higher than their states’. More than 30 cities and hundreds of counties have passed “sanctuary” laws that protect undocumented immigrants from arrest and detention. And more than 200 cities and counties have ordinances that bar employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

“Cities feel a rush of urgency,” says Brad Lander, a New York City councilman and member of Local Progress, a coalition of progressive local officials from across the country. “There’s a difference between it being possible to do things at the local level and when the only possible place to make meaningful progress is at the local level.”

Risks in localized experiments

There are pros and cons to this struggle to strike a new balance among various levels of government. Experimenting at the local level may be relatively low-risk, notes Ms. Furchtgott-Roth at the Manhattan Institute, but “if it’s easy to do something, it’s easy to do bad policy.” There’s also the danger that a patchwork of policies could result in even worse inequality, not within cities but among them. Seattle and San Francisco may have the resources to weather a failed policy or two, but less affluent cities like Cleveland or Detroit probably won’t. “We want to lift up all places, not abandon some,” Greene says.

Still, he says, “Cities working more creatively with what’s in their toolbox to address local concerns around rising inequality is really exciting. The future – what this new landscape looks like – is a lot of open questions.”

In Seattle, Ms. Herbold openly calls the new income tax a method of “Trump-proofing” the city. In the event that the president makes good on his promise to pull funding from social safety-net and climate programs, she says, “we want to make sure that we have another revenue source that we can turn to.”

Already the state GOP has called the tax unconstitutional and encouraged Seattleites to refuse to pay. Members of the local anti-tax movement are concerned that the policy could set an unwelcome and economy-harming precedent. “Once it starts, it’s going to metastasize,” warns Tim Eyman, a conservative political activist. “It’s a Pandora’s box.” The Freedom Foundation, a local conservative think tank, has said it’s prepared to challenge the measure in court.

Backers say they designed the policy with legal challenges in mind. “We were going to make sure that the legal viability was going to be our North Star,” Herbold says. “If we’re able to use Seattle as a test-case for what can be done, maybe that can help address some of the fears and help create a larger movement.”

SCOTT PETERSON/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR/GETTY IMAGES

Somali Mohamed Farah has benefited from donations raised via WhatsApp. His sub-clan's innovative plan to collect funds from its members is now a model for other sub-clans.

The drought was coming again, and everyone knew it – the latest manifestation of an ancient, recurring problem that has episodically plagued Somali deserts.

As livestock began to die six months ago, and the parched earth ran dry, a handful of people in this self-declared republic had a novel idea: create a WhatsApp group called Daryeel, “Caring,” to spread the news of their need.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” smiles Ali Mohamoud Kabadhe, one of the group’s creators. “The drought has long existed in the region, but this way of helping is new.”

Little did they know the marriage of a 21st-century social messaging app with a centuries-old problem would transform the fate of their sub-clan. By marshaling the support of fellow clansmen and other donors, the project drew support from as far away as the United States and Britain, providing crucial food and water to nearly 1,000 families.

The Somali clan structure has existed for centuries to keep everyone alive in times of crisis, but the WhatsApp group is a modern version of that time-honored community support. Sitting at his computer in Burco, at the center of Somaliland's drought, Mr. Kabadhe ticks off the statistics: 600 water trucks have been sent out, and monthly food packages – rice, sugar, dates, milk, and oil – given to 864 families in 39 different villages.

Here in Ununley, a settlement 30 miles to the southeast of Burco, the WhatsApp group helped 10 families with food. Yet the blessings spread much further, as villagers made clear one recent morning when they gathered under the tin awning of a building of white-painted breezeblocks, discussing the effort as some traced designs in the sand with their toes, and others listened appreciatively.

“The assistance came when we most needed it – it changed our lives,” says Mohamed Farah, a beneficiary. “We would have died without that assistance, just like our livestock. It’s the most difficult drought we’ve ever seen.”

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

A Somali boy is taught how to take a photograph using an iPhone by Barkhad Kaariye, a correspondent for the Voice of America (VOA) Somali service, as villagers who have benefited from food and cash donations mobilized by a WhatsApp group called "Daryeel" (Caring), formed by members of their clan living around the world, gather in Ununley, 130 miles east of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland.

The local coordinator for “Caring” is Safiya Hassan Ibrahim, a no-nonsense bundle of efficiency with two cellphones who holds her young son, Mubarak, while speaking of the donations. Her herds have been struck as hard as anyone’s: Of more than 500 sheep and goats, just 40 are left; of 32 camels, only four remain.

“Almost 100 families did not move, because of the help for 10 families,” says Ms. Ibrahim, noting the ripple effect that the guaranteed support for some had on the wider community, because of sharing and a certainty of supply, no matter how small. “Food was the main thing that kept us here”: food that came as the internet spread news of this sub-clan’s plight.

Life-saving speed

“WhatsApp and [the messaging app] Telegram are revolutionary,” says Jamal Abdi Sarman, the UN Children’s Fund communication officer in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, which declared independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized. His sub-clan pioneered the project, which has become a model.

Cash can be transferred directly to the group, with details sent via WhatsApp. Somalis are already adept at making direct payments for everything from fuel to food to utilities using their cellphones and a recipient number.

“From Australia, from South Africa, from Istanbul, from California, it goes into the same account in Burco,” says Mr. Sarman. “And the speed was what mattered – life-saving depends on speed. It increases the speed of mobilization, and increases the speed of delivery, and that saves lives.”

Spread on social media, the “Caring” group’s reach took off as quickly, as the drought began decimating their life-sustaining herds of sheep and goats, and camels. 

In the first month, some $20,000 in donations were sent – often direct deposits using smartphone apps – according to the creators of the “Caring” group. The second month $33,000 arrived, and then $50,000. After six months, a total of $255,000 was donated – demonstrating both a new mechanism for harnessing the Somali diaspora to help, and how it is possible for that help to arrive directly, in real time.

Truckloads of donations were delivered to coordinators in each village, and photos taken to prove delivery, which were then uploaded onto WhatsApp and Instagram for donors to see the result of their giving.

“My clan members are 850 families, and none of them perished – largely because of this initiative,” says Sarman. “What amazes us was this 21st-century technology to solve problems of those facing age-old challenges. It’s something new; nobody knew how to make it.”

Aid inspiration

The idea was so successful that other clan groups used it as a model: Messages and photos of need would spread within the initial core WhatsApp group, and then spread further on other social media platforms.

“When a person becomes bankrupt, the first thing he faces is a loss of confidence,” says Mohamed Said Aidid, one of the founders of the group.

“The first month they worried about where to live and to eat,” says Mr. Aidid. “The last six months they began to trust us: to wait for assistance, and know it is coming. Now they are very confident [the help will come]. They know they have some people they can count on.”

The next steps are to help replenish livestock, and work on long-term water projects – and even begin to help traditional herders diversify into farming, and livelihoods that depend less on rain.

“We are trying to create a pathway to sustainable life,” says Aidid. “That doesn’t mean we are leaving livestock, but reducing dependence.”

If drought does hit hard again, though, members of this sub-clan and others now know how to help: by taking their phones out of their pockets.

“We’ve seen droughts coming and going, but this is the first time we’ve seen mobile technology being employed to save lives,” says Sarman.

C-3PO’s fluency in more than 6 million forms of communication in “Star Wars” set a high bar for human-robot interaction, and the field has been struggling to catch up ever since.

They started in the factories, taking over physically demanding and repetitive tasks. Now robots are moving into hospitals, shopping malls, even the International Space Station, and experts don’t expect their expansion into human spaces to slow down anytime soon.

“Even 10 years ago, the primary use of the robots was in the dangerous, dirty, and dull work,” says Julie Shah, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. “You’d deploy them to operate remotely from people, but [now] robots are integrating into all aspects of our lives relatively quickly.”

Freed from their isolated industrial cages, robots navigating the human world can pose hazards to themselves and others, so researchers are seeking ways to prepare for a future where people and robots can work safely together.

While they wouldn’t have made his official list, C3PO’s most important forms of communication may have been nonverbal. We absorb a staggering amount of information visually, from gestures and facial expressions to traffic lights and turn signals, and good design can take advantage of that skill to let humans meet robots halfway.

Signaling to others

Holly Yanco, computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, suggests early measures could be as simple as equipping robots with universal icons. 

“I may not need to know everything that the robot is doing, but I need to know that this space is safe for me to walk into,” explains Professor Yanco.

A survey conducted by her graduate student, Daniel Brooks, found traffic light colors overlaid with simple symbols such as checks or question marks sufficient to communicate a robot’s status to untrained bystanders. Think of the “Halt!” robots from “Wall-E.”

Such iconography still depends on culture, Yanco is quick to point out. Another path involves giving robots something all humans have experience reading.

Rethink Robotics takes this approach with its dual-armed Baxter, which features a cartoon face displayed on a swiveling tablet. Thanks to Baxter’s animated eyes, human coworkers can know at a glance where its attention lies and which arm it may be moving next.

People watching

Even if robots become open books, that’s only half of the equation. Dr. Shah heads MIT’s Interactive Robotics Group, a lab focused on giving robots mental and sensory flexibility to complement their physical prowess.

They aim to build robotic systems that can work alongside, and even integrate with, human teams. And that means robots that learn from observation, predict teammate actions, and adjust their behavior accordingly, much like a person would. “I don’t think this is a very futuristic idea anymore,” Shah says.

In fact, the group tested just such a system last year. After an “apprenticeship” spent watching nurses and doctors, a robotic decision support system succeeded in making patient care suggestions that nurse participants in controlled experiments accepted 90 percent of the time. The study culminated in a pilot deployment on the labor and delivery floor of a Boston hospital, where the system gathered inpatient data from handwriting on a whiteboard and offered real time advice.

“That was the first time anybody has been able to demonstrate a system learning so efficiently with so few demonstrations in a real world setting,” says Shah. “It can be done.”

Still, even the most mentally dextrous teammate will sink a project if they can’t keep out of the way. “When you start working in a confined space, an elbow-to-elbow space, body posture and motion signals become very important. People rely on them,” says Shah.

Her team also harnesses machine learning and biophysical modeling to help robots read human body language, and predict where a teammate will move next. For example, tracking a person’s walking speed and head direction reveals which way they’ll turn about two steps early, information we humans only become aware of when a miscalculation ends in the “hallway dance.”

“Clearly we all use these cues everyday but we don’t think about it,” says Shah. “Just a quarter of a second or half a second of an arm reaching movement ... with just the slightest motion of their elbow or their shoulder, we can train a machine learning technique to predict with 75 percent accuracy where they’re going to reach.”

Reading minds?

While Yanco and Shah help catch robots up to people’s signaling and interpreting abilities, other researchers see no reason to limit robots to human senses. Another system developed by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can read minds. Or at least one very specific thought.

While researching brain-to-computer interfaces with monkeys, Boston University Prof. Frank Guenther was struck by how one particular signal came through unusually clearly against the cacophonous background of neural activity. When the monkeys noticed that the computer under their control had made a mistake, a cursor moving right when they had thought “go left,” for example, the system registered a so-called “error potential.”

The signal was strong enough to be detected via an electrical cap and featured a relatively similar shape from person to person. A collaboration between CSAIL and Dr. Guenther’s lab succeeded in designing a system that let a Baxter robot sort paint cans and wire spools into two buckets by “listening” for error potentials, randomly guessing at first and then self-correcting if it noticed the user thinking it made a mistake.

At around 85 percent accuracy, the system isn’t ready for the factory floor, but Guenther expects eventual applications such as a human overseeing a self-driving car or a supervisor monitoring manufacturing machines.

“We’re capitalizing on the fact that the human brain already has a tremendous amount of circuitry built for understanding things and if it sees a mistake, that mistake can be at a pretty high level and still generate a signal,” he says.

And there’s no reason to expect machines to stop at error potentials. Guenther can imagine a future where smartphone cameras measure pupil dilation and cases measure skin resistance (much like today’s lie detectors) to read the user’s emotions and respond more empathically.

A functional C-3PO may still be a long way off, but Yanco agrees that we’ve just begun to see what’s possible when robots and humans join forces. “We’re still in the very early days,” says Yanco. “I think there’s still a lot of exploration to go.”

AP Photo

An advertisement for DraftKings hangs on the side of Madison Square Garden in New York City last year.

Daily fantasy sports has boomed into a $3 billion industry in recent years. Yet many states still haven’t decided if this online contest between imaginary rosters of real athletes in professional sports is a game of skill or gambling. A handful of states have banned it while 14 states simply regulate it, mainly for the tax revenue. About 20 more are deciding what to do. Amid this national debate, a state commission in Massachusetts has issued a decision that may help clarify the issue.

The panel says daily fantasy sports is online gambling – no matter what the level of skill. A wager placed on an uncertain event as a form of amusement is still a wager. And it deserves strict controls to prevent all the potential abuses of any gambling enterprise.

The lengthy decision is upsetting for DraftKings and FanDuel, the two companies that dominate this industry. They don’t want other states to accept this reasoning as it will mean licensing and taxes similar to those imposed on casinos. The two firms contend that fans of daily fantasy sports rely mainly on their knowledge to win money. The Massachusetts panel, however, decided that there can be no balancing test between chance and skill for such a game. Its opinion will now be considered by state legislators.

Trying to use statistics to determine the level of skill for a game played for money – as many courts have tried to do – ignores the fact that even the most skilled can lose and the less skilled can win. In professional sports, an unexpected bounce of a ball can defy a statistician’s prediction.

Waging money in fantasy sports is akin to betting with a friend on the point spread of an NFL game. And in most states, sports betting remains illegal.

What really worries some state officials, however, is that any form of recreational gambling, whether real or fantasy, can have negative social consequences, either in a rise of crime or for problem gamblers. Even before this decision, the Massachusetts attorney general imposed strict rules last year on daily fantasy sports. People under age 21 are not allowed to play, college sports cannot be included, and players must be limited in how much they can bet.

A deeper concern is that states which allow or even promote gambling are also reinforcing a belief in luck as a path to prosperity instead of education and hard work. The Massachusetts panel gets it right. Any amount of “chance” in a commercial game deserves government scrutiny. Humanity has made too much progress in understanding the underlying causation of events to keep embracing “luck” as a driving force.