illuminating science

I really love reading Isaac Asimov, especially his robot novels and stories. It’s just so amazing how many things he predicts, and how appropriate so many of his stories are even now. He was even the first person to introduce the term “robotics”! In his stories, by about the year 2000 robots with positronic brains would be common place, at least amongst off-world mining jobs, etc. It’s interesting to note that in most of his books (despite what the “I, Robot” movie that came out recently had to say) never included robots in use for the general public, or anywhere on Earth outside of the factory - they were always feared and mistrusted by people, despite the Three Laws.

Of course, this hasn’t come to pass, and positronic brains are complete fantasy, but robots are slowly making their presence felt. The most famous of them would be ASIMO, which seems to be the first reasonably functional humanoid robot. There’s some pretty amazing videos of him - including him climbing stairs and, my favourite, showing off all his abilities including playing soccer - sort of! Although ASIMO doesn’t yet have any real applications beyond being a tour guide at science centres and very big Japanese businesses, it does show some potential. Note the use of “it” - the FAQ says

I may be a humanoid robot, but I’m still a robot. Therefore, it is most appropriate to refer to me as “it”, or you can simply call me “ASIMO”

It’s an interesting tack they’re taking - rather than trying to make you feel comfortable with a “him” or a “her”, they want you to think of “it” as nothing more than a machine, a walking computer. This again is in line with most of Asimov’s stories, where robots are treated as nothing more than advanced computers, that are perfectly deterministic in their functioning, and deserve no more “respect” than a computer does. But completely disagreeing with that are stories like “The Bicentennial Man” and robots such as R. Daneel Olivaw, in many ways the hero of Asimov’s robot stories and one of my favourite characters. These robots had personality, intelligence and, it seemed, free will. It is hard to believe those robots didn’t posses true “intelligence”, or what we these days would call “artificial intelligence”.

The application of Asimov’s Three Laws to real robots is still the subject of much debate - after all, Asimov’s stories showed that there’s almost always a work around. Most likely, we’ll never get to the point where robots are making complex enough decisions to decide to turn on their “masters”. All the same, it’s a little disconcerting the way the presenters treat ASIMO in those movies, as if he’s a clever dog with a personality that , while at the same time assuming he’s nothing more than a walking pocket calculator…