Spoiler alert: this post contains spoilers concerning Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories.
I went to see “Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Experience” last summer. It was a bit like watching “Jurassic Park” in 3-D. As the larger beasts were remote-controlled robots, this led me to Michael Crichton’s earlier film, “Westworld”.
This brought me to the realization that robots have now entered the third stage of technological development. Real life (or in this case artificial life) has overtaken fiction.
Stages of technological development:
- It can’t be done. In this stage, something has been conceived, but the means to achieve the desired result does not exist. For robots and automata, this was the case for thousands of years.
- It can be done, but is very expensive for the return. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was possible to build clockwork mechanisms which seemed very realistic, but couldn’t do much. Early electronic robots were much the same. Then factory robots were constructed, which were versatile but very expensive.
- It is relatively cheap and easy to do. This is the current situation. There are robots available to the public which are very useful: mowing lawns and vacuuming floors are among the tasks these machines perform. They are used as toys: Robo Sapiens, Robo Raptor.
- It is obsolete. Hopefully this stage is far in the future.
The history of robots is summarized in an excellent Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot so I won’t recapitulate that.
Automata have always fascinated us. Greek mythology says Hephaestus built several robot servants, including the giant Talos, which may be seen in Ray Harryhausen’s film “Jason and the Argonauts”. Early automata were either explicit mechanical toys or elaborate hoaxes like the Turkish Chess Player which was controlled by a person inside its cabinet. Jewish folklore has the Golem.
“Frankenstein” probably belongs to the class of robot/android fiction. However, the monster was never designed as a worker, or a servant, but as an experiment in artificial life. So we’ll leave him out of the discussion.
L. Frank Baum’s Tin Man is one of the first literary cyborgs, part man, part machine. He, too, is not a robot.
Karel Capek’s “R. U. R.” was the first story to name Robots, though he gives credit to his brother for coining the term.
One of the earliest functioning robots was a dog named Sparky. It would follow lights, and when it got close enough, bark at them. Legend has it that one of the 3 Sparkys got out of the exhibit hall one evening and was struck by a car. This is an example of a robot imitating its living counterpart too successfully.
Real self-guided robots came into their own with the development of computers, and combined mechanisms with sensory feedback and programming to produce truly remarkable machines.
Science fiction continues to give robots a bad rap, through deadly malfunctions. In most cases, this is a result of assigning too much responsibility to a machine. There are human analogies in each case:
(For discussion purposes I’m going to include as Robots any machinery controlled by a computer)
A computer gains control over nuclear missiles:
- Colossus: The Forbin Project.
- Doctor Strangelove
- Fail Safe
The human equivalent: Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
Robot or computer kills people:
Human equivalent: Pretty much any story about someone going postal due to stress.
Robots supplant the human race:
- R.U.R.
- The Matrix
- The Terminator
Human equivalent: genocide, colonization, slavery.
The point is, these machines became dangerous not because they acted like machines, but because they acted like people.
Isaac Asimov wrote many stories about robots, especially about the danger they may represent. His robot-builders fashioned laws to protect man from such danger:
- A Robot may not harm a human being, nor by inaction allow a human to come to harm.
- Subject to the 1st law, a Robot must obey orders given it by a human.
- Subject to the 1st and 2nd laws, a Robot must protect its own existence.
For Asimov’s laws to work, first robots will have to learn to recognize human beings, and to be able to understand what harm is, and what may cause it. Even were such understanding possible, danger still existed: Robot Giscard Reventlov realized that humans could endanger themselves and formulated another law which had higher priority than the others:
- A robot may not allow the human race to come to harm. [Pedantic note: this law should have become the First Law of Robotics, and the other laws should have been renumbered to match. Instead, R. Giscard called it the Zeroth law, which is not linguistically correct. Perhaps Asimov was trying to hint at the flaws in Giscard's logic.]
As a result of this new law, the robots conspired to protect humanity from itself and from all other threats, resulting in the stifling of human development and the extinction of alien races which might have posed a threat. So even the best of intentions can create disaster.
Robots are not yet versatile: they cannot perform a wide range of tasks without reprogramming. They do not come with a wide range of attachments to allow them to weld a seam and then mix eggs, for example.
In becoming versatile, robots will also become more complex. It is in complexity that danger resides, for the more human a robot becomes, the more we are apt to treat it like a person. People have already been killed by industrial robots, because the robots did not know they were there.
Which brings us back to Westworld. In that film, people died because robots interacted with people and malfunctioned. Increased automation poses similar dangers, not just physical ones. Computerized telephone systems cause frustration: it may be the human component that malfunctions in such circumstances.
Human beings are starting to trust computers and robots. That trust is misplaced, because computers have no loyalties. Use the computer, but keep an eye on it.
This post is long and rambling. Apologies.
I just can’t do it directly from the Angel Learning page. On to the questions:
