Question: How old are ‘Robots’..?
.. turns out pretty damn old.
No matter how old you are or what year it is that you’re reading this article. We’ve been conditioned all our lives through media to want to talk to robots, to have robots serve us and for them to have their own space in society. I’m willing to bet that just a few seconds of thought is all it takes for you to realise how true that statement is.
I grew up with the on-screen likes of C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars 1977. Data from Star Trek - his first appearance in 1987 through to 2002. Then the amazing Sonny from I, Robot in 2004. I couldn’t claim myself to be a geek without the mention of TARS, PLEX, KIPP and CASE from Interstellar in 2014. These are just a few examples that immediately come to my mind as I write.
So how old is the concept of a ‘Robot’, as in an artificially intelligent driven autonomous humanoid… 1920's or 99 years old. Damn.
…the word ‘Robot’ entered the English language in 1923.
A play written by Karel Capek called R.U.R, (Rossum’s Universal Robots) took to the stage in 1921, it was the first use of the word “Robot” to describe an artificial person. Capek is said to have invented the term based on the Czech word for ‘forced labor’ and the word ‘Robot’ entered the English language in 1923. The play itself is dark, essentially the Robots realise the extremity of a soulless existence and kill all humans bar one. For some light reading you can grab a copy of the script from Amazon.
It’s no surprise we arguably have ingrained fears of robots, if our first early encounters were so irretrievably dark. In the case of Capek, conceived from the human emotion of fear came the existence of something like a human, but not. A great unknown. How to place them into a human society, what they should be like, talk like, be made from? What purpose should they have? How do we come to manage, control or accept these entities?
Observing the current state and speed in which AI is being both developed and applied. Does this fast accelerating integration of AI into consumer goods, economic process and manufacturing potentially leave us without enough time to ask ourselves as a global race the important questions to predict and prevent harm? Look what happened to the Internet for a suggestive hint — world leaders only now implementing damage limitation for societal wellbeing after no one could have predicted the harm it could represent.
If you’ve never heard of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), you should do a little more research on it. In Geneva last year, 2019, Japan “called for international rules on lethal weapons equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent autonomous machines from starting wars, causing fatal accidents and ‘deciding’ who gets to live or die”*. In response to this the International human rights associations have called for a ban on developing the weapons, calling them “killer robots”.
This is serious stuff. So serious in fact that globally all kinds of organisations exist to challenge these advancements. There’s an interesting report conducted by PAX, released in Nov. 2019 named ‘Slippery Slope’. They summarise the report very well themselves by stating, “the present report focuses on the arms industry. Its goal is to inform the ongoing debate with facts about current developments within the defence sector. It is the responsibility of companies to be mindful of the potential applications of certain new technologies and the possible negative effects when applied to weapon systems. They must also clearly articulate where they draw the line to ensure that humans keep control over the use of force by weapon systems.” You can download this report from my technologist research collection.
Are we right to seduce fear and project a dystopian future of “Killer Robots”, just like Capek did in his play? Or like the Terminator films? Fear is essential to our survival. How when our ancestors needed to flee from imminent danger, we too listen to fear when confronted face-to-face with a deadly dilemma. The psychology market often urges us to transcend our fears and to conquer what’s in front of us. If we don’t apply the psychology of ‘fear’ to technological developments greater than us, how can we ever challenge and figure out its true place within our society?
Cheer up, it’s not all doom and gloom. Promise. The humility in the human race provides for some truly inspiring applications of emerging AI technology. Here’s a few to whet your appetite: Google’s AI Impact Challenge scheme.
.. and who could ever be scared of this little dude!
That’s Vector, in case you didn’t know. More information on his AI capabilities can be found here.
* quoted from the article, ‘Japan to seek global rules on autonomous “killer robots”’ from The Asahi Shimbun website.
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