Essays. FSF Columns

It seems that our fascination with humanoid robots has little to do with industry, and everything to do with society. Robots are appealing for social reasons. Robots are romantic and striking. Robots have good image.

Even "practical" industrial robots, mere iron arms, have overreached themselves badly in many would-be applications. There have been waves of popular interest and massive investment in robotics, but even during its boom years, the robot industry has not been very profitable. In the mid-1980s there were some 300 robot manufacturers; today there are less than a hundred. In many cases, robot manufacturers survive because of deliberate government subsidy. For a nation to own robots is like owning rocketships or cyclotrons; robots are a symbol of national technological prowess. Robots mark a nation as possessing advanced First World status.

Robots are prestige items. In Japan, robots can symbolize the competition among Japanese firms. This is why Japanese companies sometimes invent oddities such as "Monsieur," a robot less than a centimeter across, or a Japanese boardroom robot that can replace chairs after a meeting. (Of course one can find human office help to replace chairs at very little cost and with great efficiency. But the Japanese office robot replaces chairs with an accuracy of millimeters!)

It makes a certain sense to subsidize robots. Robots support advanced infrastructure through their demand-pull in electronics, software, sensor technology, materials science, and precision engineering. Spin-offs from robotics can vitalize an economy, even if the robots themselves turn out to be mostly decorative. Anyway, if worst comes to worst, robots have always made excellent photo-op backgrounds for politicians.

Robots truly thrive as entertainers. This is where robots began -- on the stage, in Mr. Capek's play in 1921. The best-known contemporary robot entertainers are probably "Crow" and "Tom Servo" from the cable television show MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. These wisecracking characters who lampoon bad SF films are not "real robots," but only puppets in hardshelled drag; but Crow and Tom are actors, and actors should be forgiven a little pretense. Disney "animatronic" robots have a long history and still have a strong appeal. Lately, robot dinosaurs, robot prehistoric mammals, and robot giant insects have proved to be enormous crowd-draws, scaring the bejeezus out of small children (and, if truth be told, their parents). Mark Pauline's "Survival Research Laboratories" has won an international reputation for its violent and catastrophic robot performance-art. In Austin Texas, the Robot Group has won a city arts grant to support its robot blimps and pneumatically-controlled junk-creations.

Man-shaped robots are romantic. They have become symbols of an early attitude toward technology which, in a more suspicious and cynical age, still has its own charm and appeal. In 1993, "robot nostalgia" has become a fascinating example of how high-tech dreams of the future can, by missing their target, define their own social period. Today, fabulous prices are paid at international antique toy collections for children's toy robots from the '40s and '50s. These whirring, blinking creatures with their lithographed tin and folded metal tabs exert a powerful aesthetic pull on their fanciers. A mint-in- the-box Robby Robot from 1956, complete with his Space Patrol Moon Car, can bring over four thousand dollars at an auction at Christie's. Thunder Robot, a wondrous creation with machine-gun arms, flashing green eyes, and whirling helicopter blades over its head, is worth a whopping nine grand.

Perhaps we like robots better in 1993 because we can't have them in real life. In today's world, any robot politely and unquestioningly "obeying human orders" in accord with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics would face severe difficulties. If it were worth even half of what the painted-tin Thunder Robot is worth, then a robot streetsweeper, doorman or na

"Watching the Clouds"

In the simmering depths of a Texas summer, there are few things more soothing than sprawling on a hillside and watching the clouds roll by. Summer clouds are especially bright and impressive in Texas, for reasons we will soon come to understand-- and anyhow, during a Texas summer, any activity more strenuous than lying down, staring at clouds, and chewing a grass-stem may well cause heat-stroke.

By the early nineteenth century, the infant science of meteorology had freed itself from the ancient Aristotelian dogma of vapors, humors, and essences. It was known that the atmosphere was made up of several different gases. The behavior of gases in changing conditions of heat, pressure and density was fairly well understood. Lightning was known to be electricity, and while electricity itself remained enormously mysterious, it was under intense study. Basic weather instruments -- the thermometer, barometer, rain gauge, and weathervane -- were becoming ever more accurate, and were increasingly cheap and available.

And, perhaps most importantly, a network of amateur natural philosophers were watching the clouds, and systematically using instruments to record the weather.

Farmers and sailors owed their lives and livelihoods to their close study of the sky, but their understanding was folkloric, not basic. Their rules of thumb were codified in hundreds of folk weather-proverbs. "When clouds appear like rocks and towers/ the earth's refreshed with frequent showers." "Mackerel skies and mares' tails/ make tall ships carry low sails." This beats drowning at sea, but it can't be called a scientific understanding.

Things changed with the advent of Luke Howard, "the father of British meteorology." Luke Howard was not a farmer or sailor -- he was a Quaker chemist. Luke Howard was born in metropolitan London in 1772, and he seems to have spent most of his life indoors in the big city, conducting the everyday business of his chemist's shop.

Luke Howard wasn't blessed with high birth or a formal education, but he was a man of lively and inquiring mind. While he respected folk weather-wisdom, he also regarded it, correctly, as "a confused mass of simple aphorisms." He made it his life's avocation to set that confusion straight.

Luke Howard belonged to a scientific amateur's club in London known as the Askesian Society. It was thanks to these amateur interests that Howard became acquainted with the Li

Though millions of people had watched, admired, and feared clouds for tens of thousands of years, it was Luke Howard's particular stroke of genius to recognize that clouds might also be classified.

In 1803, the thirty-one-year-old Luke Howard presented a learned paper to his fellow Askesians, entitled "On the Modifications of Clouds, and On the Principles of Their Production, Suspension, and Destruction."

Howard's speculative "principles" have not stood the test of time. Like many intellectuals of his period, Howard was utterly fascinated by "electrical fluid," and considered many cloud shapes to be due to static electricity. Howard's understanding of thermodynamics was similarly halting, since, like his contemporaries, he believed heat to be an elastic fluid called Caloric.