Chapter 60
Ever since the word “robot” was coined in 1921, coming from Karel Capek’s play of the same year, “R.U.R.” (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”), automatons have sometimes amused but more often alarmed us. To show that these mechanical persons were friend instead of foe, an exhibitor at a 1985 Japanese trade show for video games displayed one with oversized anime-style eyes and a puppy-like tilt of the head to suggest it was more Tin Man than Terminator. Japan’s comfort level with cyborgs rose accordingly: By 2014, the country had populated its workforce with 314 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, more than any other nation, with plans to add millions more by 2025.
Mechanical men have been a staple of trade expos and world’s fairs long before the Japanese show, using that popular venue to ease fears and tensions, like Westinghouse Corp.’s Elektro the Moto-Man. A seven-foot-tall, 300-pound, cigarette-smoking, balloon-blowing automaton, Elektro possessed a 700-word vocabulary that included propositions such as “If you use me well, I can be your slave.” The submissive offer was probably a necessary palliative in an era when newspapers alarmed readers with headlines like “Robots Will Kill Music!” The lurid story reflected the battle waged by the American Federation of Musicians, which in 1930 spent in excess of $500,000 to quash the threat of so-called “robot music”—that is, prerecorded melodies it worried would steal jobs from live musicians who made a living playing in movie theaters and other venues. Job redundancies were a trifle compared to killer robots, however—like Alpha, who foreshadowed Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons when it (allegedly) shot its creator, British engineering professor Harry May, in 1932. Re-enactments of the robot-on-man assault in newspapers showed the 2,000-pound, six-foot-tall steel automaton going berserk with a revolver in his cold metal hand plugging his maker. May had actually wounded himself (a slight gunpowder burn) when the gun discharged as he was placing it in Alpha’s hand to set up a stunt. But the story’s drama-deprived reality contained far less truthiness than the idea of conscious mechanisms rising up to crush puny humans. The fear found high-octane fuel in the belief of 20 percent of Americans that much of the Depression’s job losses could be blamed on automation.
Humanity tried to reassure itself through articles like Modern Mechanix’s 1934 “I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot” featuring Jack Dempsey, “The Manassa Mauler” and world heavyweight boxing champion, who bragged of any potential cybernetic foe, “I could tear it to pieces, bolt by bolt and scatter its brain wheels and cogs all over the canvas.”
But it was exhibitions that established a less combative and more chummy image for robots. Alpha’s appearances at the London Radio Exhibition of 1932 and the 1935–1936 California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego suggested he was a regular guy who liked the dames and enjoyed a cigarette break. Besides apparently cavorting in staged photo ops with the sultry Zorine, “Queen of the Nudists,” Alpha smoked cigarettes, fired the infamous gun, and answered questions. When asked about his love life, Alpha replied, “I’ve a heart of steel. I don’t love nobody and nobody loves me.” (Most likely May had a hidden confederate who spoke for Alpha through a microphone or who activated a relevant wax-cylinder record inside the robot to answer a given query.)
Exhibitions continued to serve as the social Venn diagram where robots overlapped with humans. Elektro ingratiated himself with the public while on a tour to promote Westinghouse, including appearances at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair and Chicago’s Electric Living Show. Humanizing him even more was his pet, Sparko, a mechanical dog who could sit, beg, and bark. To reassure humanity even more that these were merely tools and not imminent overlords, the robots were usually photographed not with middle-aged professional white men, but with marginal people: women, children, minorities. The subtext was clear, that just as these flesh-and-blood groups were more servile than subversive, so too were the automatons. Elektro, for example, appeared in “Sex Kittens Go to College” as the robot “Thinko,” with strippers, a chimpanzee, and Brigitte Bardot’s sister. The frothiness of the plot and the marginalia of the surrounding co-stars suggested again that automatons knew their place.
The reign of Alpha and Elektro, with their morphology of above-average height and a hefty torso shaped like a freestanding mailbox, continued in the mid-1960s with Freddie Ford. An affable automaton made out of automotive parts like hubcaps, oil pans, and shock absorbers, Freddie towered 8.5 feet tall and weighed a morbidly obese 500 pounds. Embedded in Freddie’s chest were a Mustang speedometer and an odometer. At expos such as the Chicago Auto Show Freddy could field several pre-set questions from attendees:
“What does it mean to ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick’?”
Courtesy of the Chicago Auto Show
“The quotation is really, ‘Drive softly and carry a big six.’”
Soon upgraded to a nine-foot-tall, 800-pound version, the next-generation Freddy sported radiator caps with car antennas attached for ears, oil pans for feet, and parking lights from a Mustang for eyes. Guests could ask a limited set of questions by working a console on his chest. Later on, a 1970s version of Freddie used an LCD display.
Them all HAL broke loose with the devious killer computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the idea of robots the size of battleships lost its luster. Instead of friendly banter, they would be expected to speak in monotonal utterances: “Kill. Crush. Destroy.” The darkness of a machine dystopia filled the space that cheery, bubbly techno-optimism once occupied. By the late 1970s, the public preferred more diminutive mechanical men such as Star Wars’ C-3PO and R2-D2.
Honda Motor Co., Ltd. absorbed the lessons well of these proto-robots, and previous shows like the 1985 Video Game Expo, debuting not another behemoth at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, but a munchkin-tall ASIMO, which resembled an action figure in an Apollo-era space suit. Able to recognize moving objects and gestures, the diminutive contraption (it stood a little over four feet tall) was marketed as a servile helper to the human race, content to assist in menial chores. Its size suggested it too was marginal—more akin to a child that would never grow up, perhaps, or a simple dwarf that would never escape from its fairy tale confines.
The latest world’s fairs continued the tradition of allaying fears of a hostile takeover by silicon-based sultans.
Dongbu Daewoo Electronics’ marine robot pavilion at the Expo 2012 in Yeosu, South Korea, made this inevitability seem even closer with a series of mechanical men that showed them more as protectors than predators, no surprise in a country where robots currently teach English and guard prisons. Gleaming silver fish in one large tank slipped and slid through the H2O as if they were made of flesh and scales instead of metal and microchips. These Terminator trout will be employed in undersea exploration using technology that mimics nature at its fishiest. But the most telling “Sayonara, Humanity!” moment was a simple game of soccer. Played on a ten-by-six-foot field, six humanoid robots eighteen inches tall stomped after a red ball, their eyes glowing stoplight-green as they searched the field for the orb. They tripped and knocked each other down, slightly more coordinated than puppies, but righted themselves immediately. They were slow, and confused by different colors (like spectators’ shirts), but they were only at the same stage of development computers were back when an Atari was cutting edge. Their mission a pacific one, none of the bionic Beckhams inquired as to the current whereabouts of Sarah Connor.
Seen from a satellite’s view, the role of robots in exhibitions was to prepare humanity for the inevitable future where they are as braided into everyday life as electricity and the Internet. For manufacturing industries, the average global robot density comes to about 66 industrial robots installed per 10,000 workers. For individuals, it’s estimated that by 2018 global sales of privately used service robots (think vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers) will increase to around 35 million units. By the same year, professional use of service robots (e.g., agriculture, defense) will result in about 150,000 units sold.
Trade shows continue to acclimate the world to the disruptive technologies that will remake it, especially animatronic labor that works cheaper and faster. Dubai for one, introduced a prototype of RoboCop at the 2016 Gulf Information Technology Exhibition show that could scan/identify faces and report crimes. The world will need all the preparation it can get from such fairs to soften the blow: Foxconn Technology Group, the Taiwan-based maker of the iPhone, and which employs as many as 1.3 million people, plans to replace at least 30 percent of its workforce by 2020. American workers aren’t exempt from this dislocation, either. MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo found 670,000 Americans between 1990 and 2007 had lost their jobs to automation. Autonomous vehicles alone, according to futurist Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute, will reduce jobs in as many as 128 different industries.
With robots’ numbers growing as fast as their sophistication increases, people will just have to wait to see if their relationship to machines becomes as Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, or canines to humans.