Robot Visions

The fear of supplantation rose again. In 1921, not long after the end of World War I, Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R. appeared and it was the tale of Frankenstein again, escalated to the planetary level. Not a single monster was created but millions of robots (Capek’s word, meaning “worker,” a mechanical one, that is). And it was not a single monster turning upon his single creator, but robots turning on humanity, wiping them out and supplanting them.

From the begi

Begi

It was pessimism, however, that won in the end, and for two reasons:

First, machinery grew more frightening. The fission bomb threatened physical destruction, of course, but worse still was the rapidly advancing electronic computer. Those computers seemed to steal the human soul. Deftly they solved our routine problems and more and more we found ourselves placing our questions in the hands of these machines with increasing faith, and accepting their answers with increasing humility.

All that fission and fusion bombs can do is destroy us, the computer might supplant us.

The second reason is more subtle, for it involved a change in the nature of the science fiction writer.

Until 1959, there were many branches of fiction, with science fiction perhaps the least among them. It brought its writers less in prestige and money than almost any other branch, so that no one wrote science fiction who wasn’t so fascinated by it that he was willing to give up any chance at fame and fortune for its sake. Often that fascination stemmed from an absorption in the romance of science so that science fiction writers would naturally picture men as wi

In the 19508, however, competition with TV gradually killed the magazines that supported fiction, and by the time the 1960s arrived the only form of fiction that was flourishing, and even expanding, was science fiction. Its magazines continued and an incredible paperback boom was initiated. To a lesser extent it invaded movies and television, with its greatest triumphs undoubtedly yet to come.

This meant that in the 1960s and 19708, young writers began to write science fiction not because they wanted to, but because it was there-and because very little else was there. It meant that many of the new generation of science fiction writers had no knowledge of science, no sympathy for it-and were in fact rather hostile to it. Such writers were far more ready to accept the fear half of the love/fear relationship of man to machine.

As a result, contemporary science fiction, far more often than not, is presenting us, over and over, with the myth of the child supplanting the parent, Zeus supplanting Kronos, Satan supplanting God, the machine supplanting humanity.

Nightmares they are, and they are to be read as such.

– But allow me my own cynical commentary at the end. Remember that although Kronos foresaw the danger of being supplanted, and though he destroyed his children to prevent it-he was supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for Zeus was the better ruler.

So it may be that although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.

The New Profession

Back in 1940, I wrote a story in which the leading character was named Susan Calvin. (Good heavens, that’s nearly half a century ago.) She was a “robopsychologist” by profession and knew everything there was to know about what made robots tick. It was a science fiction story, of course. I wrote other stories about Susan Calvin over the next few years, and as I described matters, she was born in 1982, went to Columbia, majored in robotics, and graduated in 2003. She went on to do graduate work and by 2010 was working at a firm called U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. I didn’t really take any of this seriously at the time I wrote it. What I was writing was “just science fiction.”

Oddly enough, however, it’s working out. Robots are in use on the assembly lines and are increasing in importance each year. The automobile companies are installing them in their factories by the tens of thousands. Increasingly, they will appear elsewhere as well, while ever more complex and intelligent robots will be appearing on the drawing boards. Naturally, these robots are going to wipe out many jobs, but they are going to create jobs, too. The robots will have to be designed, in the first place. They will have to be constructed and installed. Then, since nothing is perfect, they will occasionally go wrong and have to be repaired. To keep the necessity for repair to a minimum, they will have to be intelligently maintained. They may even have to be modified to do their work differently on occasion.

To do all this, we will need a group of people whom we can call, in general, robot technicians. There are some estimates that by the time my fictional Susan Calvin gets out of college, there will be over 2 million robot technicians in the United States alone, and perhaps 6 million in the world generally. Susan won’t be alone. To these technicians, suppose we add all the other people that will be employed by those rapidly growing industries that are directly or indirectly related to robotics. It may well turn out that the robots will create more jobs than they will wipe out-but, of course, the two sets of jobs will be different, which means there will be a difficult transition period in which those whose jobs have vanished are retrained so that they can fill new jobs that have appeared.

This may not be possible in every case, and there will have to be i

In the past, advances in technology have always necessitated the upgrading of education. Agricultural laborers didn’t have to be literate, but factory workers did, so once the Industrial Revolution came to pass, industrialized nations had to establish public schools for the mass education of their populations. There must now be a further advance in education to go along with the new high-tech economy. Education in science and technology will have to be taken more seriously and made lifelong, for advances will occur too rapidly for people to be able to rely solely on what they learned as youngsters.

Wait! I have mentioned robot technicians, but that is a general term. Susan Calvin was not a robot technician; she was, specifically, a robopsychologist. She dealt with robotic “intelligence,” with robots’ ways of “thinking.” I have not yet heard anyone use that term in real life, but I think the time will come when it will be used, just as “robotics” was used after I had invented that term. After all, robot theoreticians are trying to develop robots that can see, that can understand verbal instructions, that can speak in reply. As robots are expected to do more and more tasks, more and more efficiently, and in a more and more versatile way, they will naturally seem more “intelligent.” In fact, even now, there are scientists at MIT and elsewhere who are working very seriously on the question of “artificial intelligence.”

Still, even if we design and construct robots that can do their jobs in such a way as to seem intelligent, it is scarcely likely that they will be intelligent in the same way that human beings are. For one thing, their “brains” will be constructed of materials different from the ones in our brains. For another, their brains will be made up of different components hooked together and organized in different ways, and will approach problems (very likely) in a totally different ma