The Elephant and The Robot


The Elephant & Castle is a famous/infamous set of road junctions that weave around a monolithic 1960s Shopping Centre in the London borough of Southwark, one mile south of the river Thames. For five decades or so, the surrounding area was characterised by older working-class communities housed in postwar estates such as the Heygate, though these are steadily being demolished to make way for new developments like Elephant Park, with the residents often forced by dramatically escalating house prices to relocate to London’s peripheries. This is regeneration — or gentrification, depending on your point of view — on a massive, very visible, scale.
One of the first of seventeen major regeneration projects to be completed is the ‘Castle’ leisure centre, where I often swim. I’ve come to regard the pocket of redesigned urban space immediately outside the Castle as a pleasurable success: the re-landscaped park, brightly-coloured children’s’ playground, water features, mini-plaza and, especially, the terrace of the (inevitable) branch of Pret a Manger which, with its shade-providing trees, outdoor seating and quirky retro-future street lamps can feel, on a sunny afternoon, like the modernised central square of a small southern French ville.
It was here that we saw the robot.
The redesigned road system around the Shopping Centre incorporates cycle paths and wide pavements, often purposefully blended together. And it was along one of these broad mixed-use thoroughfares that the robot rolled into view. From where we sat, its provenance was a mystery. It entered our field of vision from the direction of the Kennington Road, to the south-west, suddenly there. A bunch of us stood up to stare, some moving closer to get a better look. I stepped nearer to take a couple of photographs with my iPhone. People were animated; pointing and commenting.
On one level, it was a refreshing reminder of the status of robot-awareness amongst regular folk. Because of the work I do, I’m exposed to all the tech-chatter about AI and the latest pronouncements from Elon Musk. I probably hear the words ‘machine learning’ too often for my own peace of mind. I’m wary of the glib young entrepreneurs I encounter who want to replace my doctor/prospective employer/shopkeeper with AI primarily because they think they can make a ton of money by doing so (whatever they might say in public about wanting to “change the world”). Indeed some appear to have already become automata themselves, devoid of morality, ethics, empathy or what was once called fellow-feeling.
As a result I’m robo-sceptical. I happen to think that’s a healthy thing to be.
And yet. There was something notable about our collective response, outside the Pret. I’ll try and put my finger on it. Firstly, it was clearly an emotional one. Not to the thing itself; it was really nothing much more than a very large cool-box on wheels. You could say it was shiny and new-looking with no sharp corners, pristinely clean in both design and current condition. It would have been terrific for conveying an illicit supply of pre-bought music festival beer from car to canvas at the optimum temperature.
The only emotion evoked by it as an object was the aesthetic satisfaction derived from its neutrally elegant functionality. The emotional reaction, however, was about its behaviour. Or, should I say, its apparent behaviour. No, even that’s not right. How about: the behaviour that we attributed to it.
To precisely pin down the moment of anthropomorphised identification between human and machine; our feelings were triggered when it stopped to cross the road. I know this because a) I felt it and b) several other people made specific comments about it.
Crossing a busy road can trigger strong emotions, as anyone who has held the hand of a small child and waited for the ‘green man’ to appear as lorries hurtle past, will tell you. The circulatory system at the Elephant & Castle is complex and frantic, requiring pedestrians to traverse wide expanses of highway to get from one part to the other, from the Shopping Centre to the London College of Communication, or from the giant Wetherspoons to the Tube station.
So we felt for the robot, as it waited on the pavement/cycle path alongside alert, cautious pedestrians. Indeed, the ‘feelings’ we attributed to it were, precisely, those of alertness and caution. There was robo-cuteness — a quality that’s been strip-mined by Hollywood in the cause of family entertainment — in the evident fact that this machine, for all its vaunted superior technology and intelligence, had to wait for the lights to change, just like the rest of us.
There was speculation amongst the coffee-drinkers — admin workers from nearby Southbank University, damp-haired swimmers and students — about how it knew when to cross. When a gap in the traffic appeared, long enough for some of the waiting humans to make a dash for it despite the red light, the robot stayed put, sticking doggedly to the rules. Perhaps we admired its restraint, its lack of precipitancy, its ability to wait with equanimity. Indeed, a couple of people, me included, explicitly remarked on its apparent ‘patience’.
Eventually the lights changed and it trundled off over the crossing, across four lanes of halted traffic, disappearing into the buzz of people at the foot of the Shopping Centre.
The two young women with whom I was sharing a table immediately struck up a robot-related conversation and we worked through our mixed feelings about the encounter. Despite all the chatter and speculation and earnest commentary that’s around, for most of us it was the first time we had actually seen one of the things. We chatted about AI and driverless cars and who they would kill in a split-second ethical dilemma and eventually drifted back to our phones.
I posted a photograph on Twitter and a steady stream of comments, likes and retweets followed that continues several days later. Which makes me think that we weren’t the only robo-virgins around, nor the only ones to wonder about the nature of our responses.
One of the Twitter comments simply said ‘Just Eat’ and rapidly punctured any anthropomorphic illusions I might have retained about the sighting. The food delivery service has been trialing robots in some parts of London, having announced in December last year that ‘Simone’ from Greenwich was “the first person in the world to receive her order by robot”.
However, I suspect that my fellow Tweeter is mistaken.
In April, The Independent reported that “Hermes has announced a new trial for self-driving delivery robots in the UK.” — in Southwark — which for me briefly evoked a dystopian vision of £12,000 handbags being transported around the borough in mobile strongboxes. The truth is more prosaic; this Hermes is an un-accented courier company, and the robots — a product of Starship Technologies, yet another startup from the founders of Skype — are controlled by human operators. They are being tested as an efficient means of collecting returned online orders. As with many early-stage tech-based enterprises, full automation is some way off and human control behind the scenes presently supports an illusory autonomy.
Which means that, when we were sentimentally watching that robot wait for the gyring traffic to come to a stop, what we were actually seeing was the behaviour of an ‘operator’ in a Hermes control centre, following the current procedure of “assuming control in challenging situations, such as road crossings.”
We were watching actual human behaviour all along, mediated through a cool-box on wheels. No wonder we read the pre-crossing moment as a familiar emotional trigger.
Our emotional responses to the most basic of robots are only just starting to be triggered. And, already, they’re not necessarily what they first seem. Watch this space.
