Sorting Steve

This is Steve. While normal robots never seem to think twice about their decisions, Steve is not quite a normal robot. Blocks that are fully red or fully yellow are not a problem, but things get more difficult when the blocks contain both colours. Steve starts to hesitate.

Hesitation is something we deal with everyday. We hesitate about what we should wear today, we hesitate about the groceries for dinner, and we hesitate all the time about the paths we take in life. Even when a choice is so arbitrary as picking a random number between 1 and 10, we still do not choose immediately. Why do we hesitate so much, and what is hesitation at its core? These question might be more easily answered after spending some time with Steve.

Can robots hesitate? It is not a characteristic that we would often ascribe to an artificial creature. Hesitation implies uncertainty, and the robots that we rely on are always certain. Right? They must be, otherwise our society relies on all this technology that can not be sure itself. Still, when a creature like Steve can hesitate on such a simple task as sorting blocks according to their colour, what does this tell us about hesitation in robots and in humans?