Timothy N. Hornyak

The author provides the history of robot-making in Japan, from medieval craftsmen making dolls with clockwork mechanisms that could serve tea, draw hieroglyphs and enact mythological scenes at festivals, to Japan becoming the first country to embrace industrial robots in the 1960s, to scientists building robots today in imitation of human and animal forms. These robots are aware of their surroundings, thanks to their cameras and sensors; they can move, avoiding obstacles; they know when people enter the room and can maintain eye-contact with them; they hear and process questions and give directions in several languages; they connect wirelessly to the Internet and read aloud the news, weather forecast and people’s e-mail upon request; they take pictures and send them to people’s e-mail accounts or cell phones; they remember faces, voices and information from previous encounters; they dance and play musical recordings; they can even read music and play musical instruments; they play mental games with people and/or house-sit, alerting their owners when they detect motion or providing them with views of any room via wireless connections when desired; and they also know when their batteries are running low and can go and recharge themselves at an electric outlet, without human intervention. Robots of various degrees of sophistication are being built in Japan by multinational companies, small businesses, dedicated lifelong amateurs and pre-teen schoolchildren. The author explains the greater interest and appreciation of robots on the part of the Japanese by their Shinto religion which says that everything, even some manmade objects, can have spirits, and the manga with robot heroes that many people there have grown up reading: "Scientists, engineers, government officials, and the legions of specialists who invest massive amounts of time and money on research into robots are propelled by the desire to create the imagined robot hero, friend, partner and laborer of their childhood fantasies."

However, despite all the efforts, true AI isn’t anywhere on the horizon: "'Two seconds or ten seconds of confusion (as to whether it’s a robot or a human) is possible, but a whole day is impossible.... We can improve the appearance.... But behavior and AI technology are quite a different matter. Perfect dialog, for example, is impossible, and will remain so, even one hundred years from now.'" The author doesn’t elaborate on this, but the problem clearly lies in the fact that no matter how sophisticated and natural a robot’s behavior looks, it really just follows its preprogrammed algorithm. For example, if a robot isn’t programmed to jump over obstacles, it will never do so, even if it can jump. Even animals and very young children can and do make independent decisions, but robots can’t, and therein lies the difference between a being and a thing. And, of course, no matter how many phrases in how many languages a robot may be programmed to respond to appropriately, it never has the slightest idea what is being said to it or what it is saying itself. As Descartes said, "I think, therefore, I am," and robots don’t think. And even if that hurdle were overcome, there’ll still be the issue of emotions. Roboticists can program a humanoid robot to smile when a person enters the room or a metal dog to become inactive or to mimic a sulking posture when ignored, but everybody knows that they don’t really feel any emotions, anymore than a desktop computer or a telephone, and that’s another area where even animals and babies easily outstrip the most sophisticated machines.

Then again, given contemporary equating of seamlessly following protocol with being professional, emotionless and unthinking machines will undoubtedly prove very profitable, once algorithms are developed to allow them to deal with more and more varied and complicated scenarios. Personally, I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I think that humans should be allowed to act like humans, including showing emotions and deviating from the rules. But on the other hand, I was glad when my phone company installed an automated pay system instead of making customer service representatives process payments. I find dealing with the automated system much more pleasant, because it doesn’t try to sell me any additional services – or get annoyed when I consistently decline the offers. And anyone who’s worked with somebody who complains that there’s never anything interesting on TV and then proceeds to describe – in detail – all the uninteresting stuff she’s "had" to watch anyway, can probably see the advantage of working with a "professional" machine. :)

Still, although I didn’t grow up reading about robots, a huge part of me wishes that there weren’t such a huge gap between how machines operate and how organisms think.… (meer)