Robots Are Us: The Mystical Side of Science (and Fiction)

By Jeremy Adam Smith, AlterNet. Posted April 12, 2002.

When I was a kid, I wanted a robot. In the twilight of the cold war, I spent my summer afternoons reading juvenile science fiction and looting dumpsters and construction sites for junk -- a tin drum for a torso, a TV for a head -- that I might one day assemble into a real robot. I remember thinking that in the year 2000 I'd be 30 years old. It seemed unimaginably distant. By then, I figured, I'd definitely have my own robot.

Technology still hasn't given me the intelligent android I wanted, but it has given today's kids fancier toys. My 13-year-old neighbor Heather likes to sit for hours at her computer creating families of virtual people called the Sims. Oblivious to the universe outside their pixilated cave, these digital dolls lie trapped in environments and situations created by a demiurge that has not even reached high school.

Heather's not very articulate about why she likes the Sims, but she's not alone in her obsession with human simulacra. Three new, very different books -- the first by a leading roboticist, the second by a cultural historian, and the third by a science fiction novelist -- all propose the same thing: that the machine we make in our own image is a powerful instrument of transcendence, an intermediary (what the ancient Greeks called anthropos) between this world and the next. By merging with our machines, these authors say, we will transcend our mental and physical limitations, gaining access to the secrets of our existence.

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Robots are no longer science fiction metaphors or wish-fulfillment fantasies. According to the United Nations' World Robotics 2001 survey, there are at least 750,000 units in operation around the world building cars, vacuuming floors, and mowing lawns. These are automated laborsaving devices, more like washing machines than androids. Even the most entertaining and experimental robots today are little more than electrical marionettes -- the most autonomous are more akin to insects than to mammals. But governments and corporations are spending billions of dollars each year researching ways to mimic human motion and the human mind with steel and silicon, and they're getting results.

In his new book Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and probably the single most influential roboticist in the world, argues that our marionettes are about to come to life. "Today there is a clear distinction in most people's minds between the robots of science fiction and the machines in their daily lives," he writes. "Our fantasy machines have ... emotions, desires, fears, loves, and pride. Our real machines do not. Or so it seems at the dawn of the third millennium. But how will it look a hundred years from now? My thesis is that in just twenty years the boundary between fantasy and reality will be rent asunder."

Brooks is well known among roboticists for a concept called "subsumption architecture," which states that for machines to become creative problem solvers and communicators, they must be embodied, and their behavior must be split into simpler behaviors controlled by subunits. "To me," he writes, "it seemed that these sorts of intelligence capabilities are all based on a substrata of the ability to see, walk, navigate, and judge. My belief ... is that [intelligence capabilities] arise from the interaction of perception and action, and that getting these right was the key to more general intelligence."

Science fiction has always envisioned robots as metal buckets into which we'd dump programming that defined their personalities and goals, providing ready-made servants. In the real future, however, we may need to raise our intelligent robots just like children, with all the unpredictability and ethical complexity that implies.

Even seemingly simple tasks like walking and differentiating human faces have proved astonishingly difficult to replicate in machines, but Brooks feels that engineering problems like these can be licked within just a few years. The real problem is finding what he calls "the juice," the X factor that will transform an object into a subject, catalyzing self-awareness and all the agony and desire that entails. Brooks refuses to call the X factor a "soul," arguing instead that human beings are organic machines whose sense of self arises from crossing a "certain complexity threshold." If we are machines and we have emotions, he reasons, then we should be able to build other machines that have emotions. If we can't find "the juice," it's because our science is not yet advanced enough.

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