We are prone to anthropomorphizing. When we think of the word "robot" we think of a machine somewhere on a continuum between R2D2 and the hot-bodied Cylons from the new Battlestar Galactica series. In short, our expectations blind us to our own lives as cyborgs in a sea of robots.
[Behold! Dagon musters evidence in support of a thesis!]
Marshall McLuhan ("MM") had a brilliant insight that technological innovations function as prosthetics to the human body. It is worth a moment to play this game for yourself. Think of a device and enumerate the body part or parts (areas of the brain count as body parts too) for which it functions as a prosthesis:
Telephone: prosthetic ear and larynx.Scrap of paper on which you have written yourself a note: prosthetic hippocampus (or wherever the short term memory is located...)Elevator, car, bicycle: prosthetic legs.Table: prosthetic lap.Shoes: prosthetic feet.
MM's metaphor of prosthetics is nice and deep: as in the real world, "prosthetics" suggests an amputation of sorts. When I use a table and shoes, I no longer eat off my lap and the skin on my feet becomes tender. Man makes tools, which, in turn, make man different.
Now machines do our work--they are our slaves, and as technology progresses, we make them increasingly autonomous because this saves work. Physical labor is hard but far less soul draining than running a very stupid machine: I feel deep pity for the people who run the elevators at the 168th Street 1/9 subway station. The elevators have two buttons. Imagine an 8-hour shift alternately pushing each button. Eliminating jobs? Amen.
Running a smart machine isn't so bad. Sitting here using Google gives me direct access to the collective knowledge of our society.Plato rightly commented that the invention of writing was the invention of forgetfulness. We are all cybernetic. We have all outsourced large chunks of our mind to our machines.
Finally, to the robots.There is a fuzzy line between the "devices" I've been describing and full-on robots, but I'd like to offer a provisional definition: a robot is a device, really an integrated suite of devices, that can replace a human being in a particular task.Thus the ATM is a robot; it replaces the bank teller.The GPS-guided, autonomous wheat harvester is a full-on robot as well; it replaces the farmer driving the harvester who replaced the sickle-wielding reapers who, in turn, replaced the poor saps who picked their food with their hands.
We are increasingly surrounded by robots, and none of them looks remotely human. This is because the human form represents myriad engineering compromises: we have evolved to do a very wide variety of things, whereas the devices we craft to do these same tasks are specifically designed to do single tasks very efficiently.In effect, it's hard to even imagine a task for which a humanoid robot would even be necessary, unless for sexual or other entertainment purposes. The end of prostitution?
The humanoid robot, as it stands, represents a design challenge, the biggest one we can imagine but not an urgent or useful one.
Our Terminator/Matrix machine-apocalypse fantasies belie the fact that our machines already rule us just as surely as we rule them.
From At The Mountains Of Madness (feed)
See also links to this feed and more from this feed
