FICTIONAL & HISTORICAL ROBOTS
FICTIONAL & HISTORICAL ROBOTS
GLOSSARY
AI winter Artificial Intelligence is a field that experiences cyclical periods of general interest and funding. In between the periods of enthusiasm for AI are ‘wintry’ years during which research appears to stagnate. During such periods, it can be beneficial to pause, reflect and generate new ideas.
analogue A term used to describe non-digital technology, in which signals are not converted into discrete digits of 0 and 1, but rather into continuous physical pulses. A mechanical watch is analogue, and so is the human voice in air.
android Coined from the Ancient Greek word meaning male and oid (meaning like or having the form of), ‘android’ is a word for robots that are male or human-like. A robot with a female appearance should be referred to as a gynoid, although the term android is often used instead.
artificial neural networks AI computing systems that are designed to work like a brain. They learn progressively by connecting inputs of information with outputs, through a filtering process that is partly autonomous, and via a collection of nodes called artificial neurons, in which each connection is a simplified version of a synapse. This model is responsible for the success of deep learning since 2011.
autonomous In the field of robotics and AI, ‘autonomous’ means being able to function with limited human intervention. An autonomous system can adapt its behaviour depending on the situation.
cybernetics Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as the study of control and communication in systems involving machines and humans. This interdisciplinary field is concerned with organization, efficiency and governance. It tends to see all living beings as part of systems, and systems themselves.
cyborg A cybernetic organism, a hybrid being composed of flesh and mechatronic parts. A cyborg could be a bionic robot that has human features, or a human enhanced with electronic and mechanical parts.
humanoid A less gendered term for android. ‘Humanoid’ can also describe a robot that has some kind of human feature, without being as human-like as an android or a gynoid. Most engineers believe that a humanoid robot is more easily accepted by humans. The same reasoning does not seem to apply to AI research: most AI systems today are expected to process information better than humans, and in ways that do not have to mimic our reasoning.
mechatronic machines Machines made of mechanical and electronic parts, and computer elements. Mechatronic engineers work on solving the integration of these various parts. Today, a fourth component is added to the mix: biological elements. A new interdisciplinary study has emerged that is probably the future of robotics: biomechatronics.
positronic Author Isaac Asimov imagined the positronic brain to describe a form of robotic minimal consciousness built upon his Three Laws of Robotics (see here). The positron is an antiparticle that is the antimatter counterpart of the electron.
psychohistory A fictional science imagined by Isaac Asimov in his novel Foundation, which would combine history, sociology and statistics in order to predict the future of civilizations. Even though individuals are unpredictable, applying the laws of statistics to large groups could allow scientists to predict future events. Today, some researchers take this idea seriously in the field of social physics.
uncanny valley This idea, proposed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, suggests that when humanoids become very human-like, yet not fully so, the general human response is a strong rejection because of their awkwardness. This hypothesis has not been proven, and it might be that humanity becomes used to the spooky appearance of humanoids.
THE GOLEM & MAGIC
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Before there was a science of AI, people believed it was up to God and the devil to help magicians animate their artificial creatures. In the late sixteenth century, the chief rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, is said to have made a creature from mud to protect the Jews in his community – the Golem. This story echoes the Biblical creation of man by God, with the word ‘Golem’ being used to describe Adam, the unfinished human being. According to Jewish folklore, in order to animate and bring life to the raw shape of clay, the creator had to write a magic sign on the forehead of the Golem. This shem, one of the Hebrew names for God, provided the life force of the creature, which, after turning against his maker, became impossible to control and ultimately had to be destroyed. The Golem might be perceived as similar to a factory robot in the modern sense; a creature that is strong but mindless. In the end the Golem becomes a paradigm for the hazards of creating something that goes far beyond our intent, and the potential danger of creation without control.
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The Golem is the myth relating to an artificial creature brought to life with magic; once granted its strength the Golem was no longer subservient and had to be destroyed.
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From Caribbean zombies to 2001’s super-computer HAL, the absence of human-like emotions, breakdown of language or the ultimate lack of control over the artefact are all common features used in ‘artificial man’ stories. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the book itself being a modern version of the Golem – inspired the term ‘Frankenstein complex’, coined by Isaac Asimov to describe the fear of mechanical men.
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KAREL ČAPEC & THE FIRST ‘ROBOTS’
HAL 9000 IN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
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ALBERTUS MAGNUS
c. 1200–80
German alchemist and magician, who was said to have had a very talkative bronze head mounted in his study
MARY SHELLEY
1797–1851
British author of Frankenstein, a cautionary tale that can be read as a metaphor about the dangers of uncontrolled science
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Andreas Matthias
Where’s the good in creative powers if we cannot control what we create?
JACQUET DROZ & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AUTOMATA
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The Writer, the Lady Musician and the Draftsman: these sophisticated androids were engineered between 1767 and 1774 by a celebrated Swiss watchmaker, Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1721–90), aided by his son Henri-Louis and his adopted son Jean-Fréderic Leschot. Watchmaking was the leading technology of this age. Since the universe was increasingly seen as a giant clock, conceiving autonomous dolls was seen as imitating God. A complex miniaturized mechanism was hidden inside the body of the automata. The Writer, still functioning today, is made of 6,000 different pieces. He holds a goose feather, which dips into an inkwell. While his eyes seem to intentionally follow his work, he draws letters to formulate up to forty characters, a short sentence that can be preset. The Draftsman used a pencil to draw a portrait of the French King Louis XVI with Marie-Antoinette, but could also be ‘reprogrammed’ to sketch the figure of other royals. The Musician was an elegant woman playing the organ with her moving fingers. Such automata fascinated early-modern European elites, inspiring philosophers including Descartes or Voltaire, rulers like Emperor Frederik II, or military commanders. Long before robots, they challenged our conception of what it is to be human and skilled.
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The first ‘reprogrammable robot’ was a scribe made of thousands of cogs invented by Swiss watchmaker Jacquet Droz, at a time where automata – human-like moving machines – were a fad in Europe.
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In 1740, Jacques de Vaucanson, whom Voltaire called a modern Prometheus, invented a famous mechanical duck that could rise, flap his wings, and appear to eat, digest and defecate. The age of rationalism was about separating the entire world into parts, and automata presented a technocratic worldview according to which the universe was a machine. This inspired nineteenth-century conceivers of calculating engines, such as Charles Babbage.
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JACQUES DE VAUCANSON
1709–82
A famous French inventor of machine tools and lifelike automatons
CHARLES BABBAGE
1791–1871
English polymath. By looking at chess-playing automata, Babbage came up with his ‘difference engine’, the world’s first computer
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Luis de Miranda
The Enlightenment saw humans as sophisticated machines. Today we tend to believe robots will be more than human.
KAREL ČAPEC & THE FIRST ‘ROBOTS’
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The word ‘robot’ in its modern sense first appeared in R.U.R., a visionary play written by Karel Čapec (1890–1938) that premiered at the Prague National Theatre on 25 January 1921. R.U.R stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots, a label that described artificial humans invented by a mad scientist named Old Rossum. Robota meant ‘forced labour’ and ‘slavery’ in Czech and Slavic. The word robot quickly became popular around the world as the play was translated and played in dozens of countries by 1923. Each Universal Robot can do the work of more than two humans, thus allowing the latter to stop working and focus on more fulfilling tasks. Rather than mechatronic machines (made of cogs and circuits but no biological component), the robots are sentient androids made of synthetic flesh. Imagined soon after the Russian revolution, R.U.R’s humanoids were perhaps seen as a metaphor for the proletarian class: they realize they have feelings and dignity, and that they can be superior to their masters if they unite and revolt. The robots eventually destroy the human species and attempt to replace it as two of them, like Adam and Eve, fall in love with each other. Today, the idea that robots might be, in Darwinian fashion, the new species that comes after us seems less and less fictional to some observers.
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‘Robot’ is a word that comes from the Czech ‘forced work’; it was coined by Karel Čapec in a play about humanoid beings who rebel against their human masters.
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Human deaths caused by robots or AI-driven machines are relatively rare. The first was registered in 1979 and was of course not intentional. Yet, perhaps to avoid a future rebellion and revenge of humanoid machines, some experts are proposing moral obligations of society towards its machines in the form of robot rights or legal electronic personhood. For example, it is argued that robots should not be sex slaves.
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CAN MACHINES HAVE COMMON SENSE?
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JULIEN OFFROY DE LA METTRIE
1709–51
French physician and philosopher who wrote the classic Man a Machine, in which he claims that humans are sophisticated automata
AUGUSTE VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM
1838–89
French author of The Future Eve and the first to use the word ‘android’ to describe his fictional robotic woman
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Luis de Miranda
If you treat robots as slaves, they might thrive to become masters.
METROPOLIS & THE GYNOID MARIA
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Fritz Lang, director of the acclaimed Dr Mabuse in 1922, was already considered a master of German film when he started shooting Metropolis in Berlin. The movie depicts a technological megalopolis where a rich minority lives above the numerous subterranean workers – enslaved and machine-like humans. One day, Freder, the privileged son of the city master Fredersen, falls in love with the activist Maria, a poor young woman who wishes to liberate her fellow workers. Freder becomes aware of the social injustice she is trying to fight and resents his father. Worried, Fredersen asks the mad inventor Rotwang to create a dark double of Maria, in order to fool his son and deceive the workers. The evil plan of the city’s master fails, and the workers turn against his totalitarian regime: eventually, they destroy the robot on a pyre. Freder and the real Maria liberate the workers, and injustice is abolished. In the movie, the robotic Maria is half human, half machine, a sort of female Frankenstein’s monster. Designed by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, the robot was played by actress Brigitte Helm. It is never explicitly determined whether the fake Maria possesses feelings, but she can certainly dance and fascinate humans like a femme fatale.
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In 1927, Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis featured Maria, a.k.a. Maschinenmensch, a metallic automaton with a feminine body – the first famous robot in the history of cinema.
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In the 1920s, the Western world was experiencing a technological boom in transportation, industry and labour standardization. The theme of the loss of control over our inventions was not new, but the fact that Maschinenmensch was feminine, as well as the political activist Maria, sheds some light on the ambiguities of technological and political progress. In some ways, Metropolis was also a movie about the fear of women’s emancipation.
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KAREL ČAPEC & THE FIRST ‘ROBOTS’
GENETIC ENGINEERING & BIOROBOTICS
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FRITZ LANG
1890–1976
Austrian-German film-maker, who identified with Expressionism. He deemed the ending of Metropolis ‘too optimistic’
DONNA HARAWAY
1944–
American professor of science and technology studies, author of the famous Cyborg Manifesto, in which she proposes an alliance between feminism and technology
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Luis de Miranda
Maria, under her metallic shell, appears to have a soul. Is this how we imagined the future of feminism?
HAL 9000 IN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
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The science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke imagined the all-too-human computer HAL 9000 in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and he worked with Stanley Kubrick (1928–99) on the screenplay of his film of the same name. HAL, a spaceship computer on an interplanetary mission, can speak and understand speech, recognize faces and steer the ship. He can reason and play chess, understand human emotions and behaviour, and can even lip-read. Like in the Golem story, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and countless other tales about artificial beings, in the end HAL turns against the human crew and tries to kill them. In a dramatic climax to the story, the last surviving astronaut manages to dismantle HAL, causing the computer to lose his abilities of thought and speech one by one. HAL (in the film) was supposed to be built in 1992 (1997 in the book). Today’s computers have some of HAL’s abilities, but are still far away from being able to converse freely as he did. HAL expresses the optimism of the 1960s AI community: one of the advisers for the movie was Marvin Minsky, then director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and one of the most influential AI researchers.
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This 1960s fictional computer provided a guiding vision to AI researchers for the following fifty years, yet even today we cannot have a credible chat with a machine.
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The absence of human emotions and the cold rationality of machines are common features of early science-fiction robots. In the 1960s, AI programming was dominated by the idea that thought is logic, and computers were programmed to solve mathematical equations, prove theorems or play chess. After this paradigm failed in the ‘AI winter’ of the 1980s, research switched to much more human-like cognition using neural networks rather than logic calculus.
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FAMOUS ‘INTELLIGENT’ COMPUTERS
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ARTHUR C. CLARKE
1917–2008
British science-fiction author and science writer
MARVIN MINSKY
1927–2016
Pioneering American AI researcher, best known for The Society Of Mind (1986), a book about how the mind might be constructed
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Andreas Matthias
Will all AI machines like HAL conclude that humans are redundant and should be taken out of the way?
GREY WALTER’S TURTLES
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The first two Machina Speculatrix turtles, built between 1948 and 1949 by the neurophysiologist William Grey Walter, were named Elmer (ELectro-MEchanical Robot) and Elsie (Electro-mechanical robot, Light Sensitive with Internal and External stability). They both had a front steering and driving wheel, driven by two independent motors, and two passive back wheels. One photoelectric cell and one mechanical switch were the robot sensors. The turtle nickname comes from the cover shell. The turtles’ ‘brain’ was implemented by analogue electronics, composed of valves and relays. An ingenious connection of the sensors to the motors through the electronic brain enabled the robots to detect shell collisions and consequently move away from obstacles, as well as to follow or move away from a light source. These robot behaviours were complemented by a ‘default’ behaviour of exploration – until a light or an obstacle was found – and an exception behaviour that would lead the turtles to a battery-charging station when a low battery level was detected. Walter would claim some years later that his turtles could display animal-like behaviours such as self-recognition by tracking their own front light when watching it reflected on a mirror, and mutual recognition – they tracked each other by moving towards the other’s lights.
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‘Turtles’ was the nickname given to the pioneer Machina Speculatrix autonomous robots, conceived to help understand brain cells’ interconnections and their impact on the emergence of complex behaviours.
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Today’s robotics researchers are often influenced by Biology, Neurosciences and Psychology, and even Economics and Sociology. They believe that since nature has developed sophisticated animals, including humans, through thousands of years of evolution, it is a good source of inspiration for building better robots. Humans interact readily, so their systems provide a good basis for constructing fluid robotic devices.
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MULTI-ROBOT SYSTEMS & ROBOT SWARMS
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NORBERT WIENER
1894–1964
American Professor of Mathematics who established the science of cybernetics
WILLIAM GREY WALTER
1910–77
American-born British neurophysiologist, who influenced well-known roboticists working on behaviour-based robotics
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Pedro U. Lima
Grey Walter became attached to his ‘turtles’, but the feeling was probably not mutual.
TERMINATOR & SKYNET
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The Terminator is a 1984 action film written by Gale Anne Hurd and James Cameron. Skynet, an artificial intelligence built for the US military, becomes self-aware. In response, humans panic and attempt to shut Skynet down. Skynet defends itself from this existential threat by attacking human civilization, launching nuclear weapons at Russia and relying on the Russian retaliation to destroy its enemies in the USA. With human civilization wrecked by the nuclear exchange, Skynet attempts to exterminate all remaining humans. The human resistance relies on a great leader, John Connor. Unable to kill him, Skynet sends a Terminator (a human-like cyborg assassin) back in time to kill Sarah Connor before John can be born. The Terminator taps into and reinforces some deep-seated Western fears about robotics and artificial intelligence. (Japanese culture, by contrast, tends to produce fiction in which robots are friends and helpers.) Firstly, Skynet is a human-like and yet far superior intelligence that becomes hostile to human beings the moment it becomes self-aware. Secondly, the Terminator is not self-aware, but physically resembles humans. Therefore the story utilizes two almost opposing fears: robots as emotionless unthinking aggressors – our dangerous inferiors – and computers as transcendent intelligences that have surpassed human intellect.
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The Terminator introduced Skynet, an AI that wanted to exterminate all humans; Skynet has become the byword for villainous AI that poses an existential threat to humanity.
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Terminators are designed to mimic the appearance of humans, allowing them to infiltrate human resistance strongholds. This mimicking would be very difficult to achieve. In the 1970s Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori found that not only are people good at noticing subtly non-human characteristics, but that also a human-looking robot that exhibited these subtle flaws caused a feeling of eerie revulsion. He called the effect the ‘uncanny valley’.
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DENNIS FELTHAM JONES
1917–81
British author whose book Colossus describes an intelligent super computer using nuclear weapons to attack humans
MASAHIRO MORI
1927–
Japanese robotics professor who developed the ‘uncanny valley’ hypothesis and started the Robocon robotics contest in 1981
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David Rickmann
Terminators tend to lack empathy and look a bit too hostile for a good conversation.
