I, ROBOT?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 239/ 06 June 2014 09:56

Like many males of my generation I grew up fairly well-disposed toward the robot. Robbie the Robot filmstar was all the rage when I was 11, and Asimov's Laws of Robotics engaged my attention as a teenaged sci-fi reader. By the time I became involved in publishing underground comics in the early 1970s the cuteness was wearing off robots, but even so the threat was moderated by humour. The late Vaughn Bodé - nowadays beloved by all the world's graffiti artists - drew a strip called "Junkwaffel" that depicted a world cleansed of humans but gripped in permanent war between foul-mouthed, wise-cracking robot soldiers. In some ways these were the (far rougher) prototypes of R2D2 and C3PO.

Out in the real world robots started to appear on factory production lines, but they were doing those horrible jobs that humans shouldn't do, like spraying cellulose paint, and humans were still being employed to do the other stuff. When I got involved in computer programming myself I was drawn toward robotics thanks to an interest in Forth, a language originally invented to control observatory telescopes and ideally suited to robot programming. The problems of robots back then were all about *training* them to perform desired motions (as opposed to spelling out in X,Y,Z coordinates) and building-in enough intelligence to give them more and more autonomy. I still vividly remember my delight when a roboticist friend at Bristol Uni showed me robot ducklings they'd built that followed each other just like the real thing, using vision alone.

Given this background, it will come rather hard to have to change my disposition toward the robot, but events in today's world are conspiring to force me to do just that. While reading a recent issue of New Scientist (26 April 2014), I was struck by two wholly unrelated articles that provide a powerful incentive for such a change of attitude. The first of these involved the Russian Strategic Missile Force, which has for the first time deliberately violated Asimov's main law by building a fully-autonomous lethal robot that requires no permission from a human to kill.

The robot in question is a bit aesthetically disappointing in that it's not even vaguely humanoid-looking: it looks like, indeed *is*, a small armoured car on caterpillar tracks that wields a 12.7mm heavy machine gun under radar, camera and laser control. It's being deployed to guard missile sites, and will open fire if it sees someone it doesn't like the look of. I do hope it isn't using a Windows 8 app for a brain. Whatever your views on the morality of the US drone fleet, it's important to realise that this is something quite different. Drones are remotely controlled by humans, and can only fire their weapons on command from a human, who must make all the necessary tactical and moral decisions. The Russian robot employs an algorithm to make those decisions. Imagine being held-up at gunpoint by Siri and you'll get the difference.

However it was the other article that profoundly upset my digestive system, an interview with Andrew McAfee, research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business. Asked by interviewer Niall Firth "Are robots really taking our jobs?", McAfee replied with three possible scenarios: first, that robots will in the short term, but a new equilibrium will be reached as it was after the first Industrial Revolution; second, they'll replace more and more professions and massive retraining will be essential to keep up; third, the sci-fi-horror scenario where robots can perform almost all jobs and "you just don't need a lot of labour". He thinks we'll see scenario three in his lifetime (which I hope and trust will be longer than mine).

It was when he was then asked about any possible upside that my mind boggled and my gorge rose: the "bounty" he saw arising was a greater variety of stuff of higher quality at lower prices, and most importantly "you don't need money to buy access to Instagram, Facebook or Wikipedia". That's just as well really, since no-one except the 0.1% who own the robots will have any money. On that far-off day I forsee when a guillotine (of 3D-printed stainless steel) has been erected outside Camden Town tube-station, McAfee may be still remembered as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette for that line.

The bottom line is that robots are still really those engaging toys-for-boys that I fell for back in the 1950s, but economics and politics require the presence of grown-ups. Regrettably the supply of grown-ups has been dwindling alarmingly since John Maynard Keynes saved us from such imbecilities the last time around. If you're going to make stuff, you have to pay people enough to buy that stuff, simples.