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Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you hear, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.
Speaker B: Hello, I’m Peter Warren with Password at the cutting edge of new technology. Normally we’re talking about the future, but I want you to activate your brain’s Wayback Machine. Cast your mind back to the first ever robot you encountered. Was it in the toy box? In the pages of Isaac Asimov’s novel I, Robot? Was it Marvin, the paranoid android on the radio? In a movie or on TV? K-9? R2-D2? Chappie? Lucy? Hal? No, no, you’ll have to go back even further to find the origin of robots. Back to January 1921 and a theatre performance, Rossum’s Universal Robots. On its centenary, we look back at how robots have developed over the past 100 years since Karel Čapek’s imaginary androids first trod the boards. Lawyer Monika Marikova is a researcher at Prague’s Karel Čapek Centre for Ethics in Robotics, named after the famous playwright. Actually, here in Britain, he’s not all that famous. A bit of an unknown, really.
Speaker C: It might be the same in the Czech Republic, generally in the general public. But at the same time, I must say that there are events taking place in the Czech Republic which are commemorating the 100th anniversary. There are conferences taking place. However, these are also quite hurdled, I would say, by the current epidemic. Normally, probably this, the plays in the theaters would take place, large conferences. However, even with our Karol Šeppek Center, we wanted to organize conference, in-person conference, which we have moved to this year. Hopefully is going to take place and we will be able to celebrate this anniversary.
Speaker B: The work is very prescient, isn’t it? Particularly if you think about artificial intelligence and where we have come with robotics now, and the arguments or the ideas have actually become things that we are now currently talking about, haven’t they?
Speaker C: Yes, it’s very interesting because a lot of science fiction works are going in the wrong direction, I would say, or never actually become true. But this one, and I mean, we are, of course, we do not have android robots walking around and being in love and things like that. However, after 100 years, we might be coming closer to this. And we have technologies which are helping human beings.
Speaker B: At the end of Rossum’s Universal Robots, they become sentient, they show empathy and love, and humans are sort of dying out. What new laws and ethical values should be applied to humanoid robots who carry out caring duties, for example?
Speaker C: I have found some interesting statistics. Which was saying that 68% of the people agreed that robots are beneficial because they can help people. But then at the same time, only 26% of the surveyed people said that they would be comfortable with a robot providing help and companionship for them if they were in a hospital or care. So it’s interesting that at one point we are looking at robots as something which might be beneficial, but at the same time, We are slightly worried about the fact that it would be not a real nurse coming and taking my temperature, for example, which could be a mechanical task indeed. And we want rather a real human being to come and not the robot. But I think that the future is so that the robots might indeed do at least these mechanical tasks. As for example taking up the temperature or the very basics or bringing up the tea. But at the same time, I think that robots to be used in the care houses need to be used very carefully and with still with the surveillance of the real human beings because this is the area where every small difference Or every single small thing can make a difference regarding the patient’s state or, or the health, wellbeing, or the health. So they might be also humanoid robots helpful for people who are lonely. There are robot pets, for example, when the person having this robot pet on one side does not need to go out with the pet on the fresh air or anything like that. Or if you go on a holiday, you just switch off the pet, of course. But on the other side, you have the feeling that there is some kind of life creature next to you. You can talk to or do something that the research says that even plants could be beneficial to people. So I think these robots might be beneficial to people. And we are just yet to discover on how good these robots are going to be. And how human the interaction with them might be in the future. And I think that still it’s, we need to be careful, especially with the patients or with the patients with certain psychological problems to use them in a good way because otherwise we might cause more harm than, than the benefits.
Speaker B: It’s interesting you say that. A Kazakhstani bodybuilder has married his sex doll. And he said that probably for Christmas that they would stay in and have a meal together, which is an interesting idea. Obviously, he doesn’t have a problem with companionship. And although for him, his Christmas was ruined because she broke down and had to be sent away.
Speaker C: And indeed, well, I mean, I do not have experience with it, but one of my colleagues is actually dealing with One of my colleagues who is an ethicist and philosopher is exploring the sexual robots. And I have seen some of his interviews or his work. And it is very interesting that in future we might have sexual robots which are just going to be just for sex. So not doing anything else, but they might be very good at this task. And some people say that it’s going to be better than the real person because the robot really knows what you want and what you need. And at the same time, you can just switch it off and it’s not going to basically interfere with your life or, or anything else. So it’s interesting that this might be future as well. Yeah. Sexual robotics.
Speaker B: I mean, do you share dystopian vision of a world dominated by robots? What’s your feeling on this?
Speaker C: Not really, or at least not at the moment. I, think that people are still going to be in control of robots, artificial intelligence algorithms for some time. It might be in future that we will be controlled by robots, but I would say not in a way that the androids would be running around and we would be enslaved, but more maybe more about the fact that the algorithms are going to be able to draw upon our data and create such a type of information which is even not imaginable for us at the moment and are going to control our lives in this way.
Speaker B: Something about Rossum’s universal robots caught the public imagination, and Čapek himself was a great ambassador for them, according to publisher Robert Wäschler. The founder of Catbird Press in New Haven, Connecticut.
Speaker D: Well, according to Chapek, he was trying to look at the different views of technology and how it affected humanity, and we certainly haven’t gotten past, past those issues. The idea that technology emancipates man, that it dehumanizes man, that it’s something fearful, that it’s something that can lead us to great utopias. His characters who sort of take positions on all of those different views, and so they’re still mainly the views that people have. I mean, that was most of, though not all of, his plays were like that in the sense that his characters were not three-dimensional characters. He wasn’t trying to create true romance and great plots, but they were really representatives of ideas that would interact in an entertaining, and sometimes in this case frightening manner.
Speaker B: Why was he concerned about technology? What provoked him to write a play saying, “Hey, we should watch this stuff. It’s a good servant, but it can be a very bad master.” That’s a good question.
Speaker D: I mean, ’cause he hadn’t in his earlier writings really dealt with that. And he ended up becoming more concerned with that after this, continued to deal with other issues of technology in what is now called science fiction, but then was at a fairly early stage. But he was a, he read very widely and in many languages, and he was reading Wells, and he was reading some of the other French early science fiction writers. So I think those issues really concerned him. I don’t know, his degree was in philosophy. He wrote his dissertation on pragmatism, American pragmatism. So he was also coming from a philosophical point of view towards technology. He wasn’t coming from a direct interest or background in technology. And in fact, where’s the technology that was used on robots isn’t the technology that we now consider to be robots. They were really what we now call androids. But, uh, so it was more— it was closer to Frankenstein, which is also something that he had read, than robotics that we think about today. Though, of course, now we have something— the increasing merger of the human and the technological, um, is something that I don’t think that he anticipated then.
Speaker B: No, but in fairness, he did pretty well with what he’d got. There was a slew of books around at this time, wasn’t there, along similar lines. We had The Machine Stops, Zamiatin’s We, and then books by H.G. Wells, as you mentioned, The Sleeper Awakes being one. They were all very, very similar. They all seemed to be interested and quite prescient too in terms of the world that we live in now. There was a big worry at this time. What was provoking that concern, do you think?
Speaker D: Well, I, you know, I think again, one of the things I didn’t say that I probably should have at the beginning is that it wasn’t so much about technology as it was about mass production. So, I mean, this was really— remember, this wasn’t very long after the Russian Revolution. This was a time when people were really questioning where capitalism was going and how it was going to affect civilization. And so he was more concerned with, I think, with that aspect of technology. You know, that’s why the company isn’t just a company that— it wasn’t like the invention of something, a single Frankenstein. It was the invention of The second generation— there’s two generations of inventors. One is sort of the Frankenstein-style, who’s trying to create something just to do it. And the second generation, which is in this— we’re in the present, the near present of the play, is about mass production, about simplifying everything and getting it out there in huge numbers to the point where people lose control. So it is important that it’s not just about science and technology, but about mass production.
Speaker B: I mean, that was a big concern, wasn’t it? Because not just did we have that Russian Revolution, we had the First World War, which was a profound shock for everybody. That seemed to be mechanized slaughter. That must have had a big impact on the minds of people because the impact on towns was considerable. Half of Salford in the UK died in one battle because the soldiers were drawn from geographical locations. That was something that stopped after the First World War because of the profound impact on the town. Half of the town went into mourning. So this idea of mechanized, industrialized destruction, this subjection of man to this mass production system, had an impact on them.
Speaker D: Yeah, it did. And in a certain sense, sequel to “Are You Are,” “War with the Newts,” which was written just before the Second World War, he really focused on some of those issues even more directly. The role of mass— not mass production in this case, but mass exploitation in warfare. Completely changing the way it worked.
Speaker E: My dear Miss Glory, we’ve had close upon 100 saviors and prophets here. Every ship brings us some. Missionaries, anarchists, Salvation Army, all sorts. It’s astonishing what a number of churches and idiots there are in the world. And you let them speak to the robots? So far, we’ve let them all. Why not? The robots remember everything, but that’s all. They don’t even laugh at what the people say. Really, it is quite incredible. If it would amuse you, Miss Glory, I’ll take you over to the robot warehouse. It holds about 300,000 of them.
Speaker F: 347,000.
Speaker E: Good. And you can say whatever you like to them. You can read the Bible, recite the multiplication table, whatever you please. You can even preach to them about human rights. I think that if you were to show them a little love— Impossible, Miss Glory. Nothing is harder to like than a robot. What do you make them for then?
Speaker G: Hahaha, that’s good. What are robots made for?
Speaker E: For work, Miss Glory. One robot can replace 2.5 workmen. The human machine, Miss Glory, was terribly imperfect. It had to be removed sooner or later.
Speaker F: It was too expensive.
Speaker E: It was not effective. It no longer answers the requirements of modern engineering. Nature has no idea of keeping pace with modern labor. For example, from a technical point of view, the whole of childhood is a sheer absurdity. So much time lost. And then again— Oh no, no! Pardon me, but kindly tell me, what is the real aim of your league? The Humanity League? Its real purpose is to— to protect the robots and ensure good treatment for them. Not a bad object either. A machine has to be treated properly. Upon my soul, I approve of that. I don’t like damaged articles. Please, Miss Glory, enroll us all as your contributing or regular Foundation members of your league. No, you don’t— you don’t understand me. What we really want is to— to liberate the robots.
Speaker B: That’s a clip from the LibriVox audio version of R.U.R. It doesn’t sound too menacing. In fact, it’s quite funny in an arch-1920s sort of way. But Dr. Mirna Solič, lecturer in Czech language and literature at Glasgow University, told Passwords’ Jane Wyatt it actually has a dark message.
Speaker H: So my name is Mirna Solič and I’m a lecturer in Czech at the University of Glasgow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. I did my doctoral research and then postdoctoral research on Karel Čapek’s travel writing, and I just recently published a book which deals with Karel Čapek’s travel opus and also with the theme of travel in his prose.
Speaker A: Dr. Šalić, it’s a dystopian play. Was Čapek very pessimistic, and why?
Speaker H: This is a dystopian play, and Karel Čapek was actually quite pessimistic. Simply because him and his generation, and that includes his brother Josef Čapek who is also quite important for this play, experienced the First World War. Well, Karel Čapek wasn’t a soldier because of the medical reasons, but he was quite aware of what the war did to humanity. So there are some scholars who think, and this is also my opinion, that Karel Čapek’s robots are basically inspired by what he saw in the First World War, and these are disabled people returning from the front. Because when you think about the robots, they are human but not really human. So there is something about them which is not really human-like. And then when you think about it even deeper, they really do resemble, I think, disabled people. So this is his feedback on the experience of the war.
Speaker A: How did the government receive the play?
Speaker H: The government was very supportive about Karel Čapek’s work in general, and also Karel Čapek He actually, when I wrote my book about travel writing, I found out that he traveled around Europe many times on the funding which was provided by the government. Because we have to know that in 1918, Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart and the first Czechoslovak Republic was founded, was established. That was the time when Czechs really tried, especially the government, to promote a new country abroad and to show what this new country is all about, so to say. To show that the cultural identity of the Czech lands is something shared with European identity in general.
Speaker A: To what extent is it a science fiction piece, or is it more of a political and cultural statement?
Speaker H: It is quite an interesting question. This is actually a science fiction piece, or is it more of a political and cultural statement? Because science fiction as such at this time did not exist. Science fiction as a genre came to existence a little bit later on, and I think many people interpret this as science fiction because Here we have robots on the stage. This means for the first time something that we consider non-human. But I think it is mostly political and cultural statement simply because there is this great influence of the First World War which I mentioned about disabled and traumatized people returning from the front and then trying to live the normal life. This is something that Karel Čapek dealt with in his other works, especially in the play the life of insects. But it also, I think, was inspired by his own awareness of social and political issues, simply because Karel Čapek was born in a small town in the north of the country. His father was a doctor, and his father treated many workers who worked in the textile industry. So these are basically people who worked on assembly, on, on the production line, and they lived in very bad conditions. So I think it is also about the social circumstances, of the life circumstances of many people and of the proletariat of that time.
Speaker A: To what extent did this sympathy for ordinary working people influence the characters of the robots in the play?
Speaker H: I think very much, because if you look at it, he was quite sympathetic towards robots, and this could be seen for the character of Helena, who is representative of the League of Nations, who actually comes to save the robots. And well, you know, they fall in love with her. So there is the love story between humans and something that resembles humans. So definitely there is a lot of sympathy. But it is also quite interesting now when we talk about this, that when you think about robots, these are really not mechanical creatures. Again, they’re human-like, they are organic, and this change into non-human happens, I would say, within this human element.
Speaker B: The creepy feeling we get when lifelike humanoid robots appear is a universal, almost instinctual reaction. It’s been researched and plotted on a graph. Professor Karl McDorman at Indiana University translated the uncanny valley a 1970 scientific paper by Japanese robot guru Masahiro Miro explaining how people and androids interact.
Speaker F: Masahiro Mori’s idea is that if we look at an industrial robot, it’s not very human-like. It’s developed based on its function. So in a factory, you might have a robot arm, but it doesn’t look very much like a human arm. Then if you think about something like a toy robot, Well, it may be sturdy, but it’s designed to also be appealing. So, sort of toy robots, or a kind of cute robots, these are approaching the first peak. And you might think that as you make the robots more and more human-like, you know, as you design them with more and more human features, just like the toy robot, you know, may have a head and arms and so on, it seems more human-like. Than the industrial robot, you might think that your affinity would continue to increase. But his argument, based on some observations he made, like of wax figures in museums or robots at a World Expo that were programmed to smile and so on, his observations and his sort of thought experiments led him in a different direction. He thought if you try to make the robot too human-like, it becomes something like a zombie, like a moving corpse. It looks human, but it’s not really human. The movement is jerky and so on. So he looked at very realistic prosthetic arms, for example, and you might look at it and think that it’s a real arm or a real hand, but then if you actually shook it, let’s say, and you felt the coldness and the hardness or just the lack of warmth, then you might have a very strange feeling because of that. And of course, you know, as you make the robots more and more human-like, to the point of being nearly indistinguishable or indistinguishable from a healthy human being, then again, you know, you’ve come out of that valley of eeriness, that sort of valley where robots are zombie-like, into a valley where they’re nearly indistinguishable or they’re indistinguishable from from humans. So that’s why there’s a valley shape.
Speaker A: And why is it important for you and other scientists to research these feelings, these— this sense of creepiness and so on?
Speaker F: I think there are many reasons why the uncanny valley is an interesting topic and an important topic. So in computer games, for example, or in film, there’s quite a bit of money at at stake. When we think of the computer game industry, it’s like approaching or exceeding $100 billion, same with computer animated films. And so getting things wrong can just destroy a game or destroy a film. So that’s also part of my, my work is how the uncanny valley interacts with empathy and especially empathy in the context of a narrative or story. So, for example, for a story to work as a story, we have to be able to identify with the characters, we have to be able to feel transported to a different world, we have to be able to put ourselves into the role of the characters and see things from their perspective. And this is especially true for the protagonist or hero in a story. So if you look at a film like Mars Needs Moms, people felt creeped out and they felt very disturbed by the sort of protagonist in the film and his sidekicks and mother and so on. People they should feel empathy for, of some kind of emotional connection, and it may have caused the film to fail at the box office. I mean, it could have other problems, and this has been a problem that’s been identified with many films.
Speaker A: Now, here in Europe, there are some people, some politicians and policymakers, who have declared in an EU directive that it’s unethical to make robots look completely like humans because they may be deceiving the humans around them. For example, in a care home setting or something like that, the people around them might believe that they really are human. What’s your view of that? Is it an ethical issue for you?
Speaker F: Of course, and I think the issue isn’t only with robots that look very human-like. For example, there’s a robot called Paro that looks like a baby seal, and it has been used in nursing homes, including nursing homes in Massachusetts. And Sherry Turkle did a study, and she found that there was this elderly woman who had formed an attachment to Paro, and she was separated from Pero. I think one of the nurses found it very inconvenient to have this robot. Some of the elderly people might take it in the bath or do something like that, so Pero was just thrown in a closet for a while. And then suddenly this elderly woman was reunited with Pero, and she had felt a sense of abandonment because she had been abandoned in the nursing home and her son hadn’t visited her for a couple years. So she also saw how Pero had been abandoned and had a kind of epiphany. But what Sherry Turkle, who’s a named professor at MIT, pointed out is that there was no authenticity in this relationship. It was like just— Pero is just a kind of bag of tricks. It’s like a smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t really understand anything. And it’s really just keying in on our Darwinian buttons. You know, we speak, it turns toward us, it makes eye contact. It has simple tricks like that, but because of them, we cannot help but feel that it’s sentient and treat it as we would treat a dog or a cat. And I think that’s the kind of risk that you already see in a robot that is trying to mimic an animal, a non-human animal. So Of course, if it’s mimicking a human, then there could be a more dangerous situation.
Speaker A: What do you think we should do to guard against that?
Speaker F: I think it’s rather complicated. I mean, it’s what settings you can use the robots in. So far, androids have been very expensive and not available to everyone, so we haven’t really seen them used very much outside of research settings or in ways that they could be used for kind of exploitation or con artistry or something like that. So, I don’t know, I think there is the potential for that. I’m not sure it’s an issue right now. But I’ve certainly seen in working with androids that people will treat them differently, and because they look human, they demand something that other media do not demand. For example, people who have visited the lab in Osaka have had very strange experiences when the android’s turned on and they’re like leaving for the night and turning off the light. It’s very strange. Or when you’re interacting with something that’s human, it kind of can demand a place in the conversation, so to speak. So this is certainly something that could be exploited.
Speaker A: When you mention those weird experiences in Osaka, what actually happened? What were the robots doing?
Speaker F: So, for example, in 2005, we prepared the robots for a world exposition in Aichi. And at the exposition, they go through a kind of semi-scripted interaction where they’re saying, like, “Hello, how are you? What’s your name? Where are you from?” And then based on what the person says, if they’re from, you know, Osaka, they could say, “Oh, I’m from Osaka too,” or, “You’re from Kyoto? Oh, the people are cold there.” something like that. And so they’re used in that setting, or also on the news for NHK. The robot’s head was replaced to resemble Ayako Fujii, who’s an NHK news announcer— was at that time anyway— and presenting the news and so on. But it’s just, I noticed, you know, it’s not always that in these situations that are very planned and scripted that there’s an issue. But it could be in other situations, like when Peter Kahn was visiting with his wife, Batya Friedman, at the time they were married. And when he wanted to open up the android and look inside and see how it worked, he turned to his wife and asked her for permission, which is really weird, and you wouldn’t think that would happen with a robot-like robot or something like that. So I do see that they are are able to elicit the sort of behavior that we direct toward other people rather than toward robots, and that they can do this even to people who work with robots.
Speaker B: Smart engineers steer clear of the uncanny valley by building automated machines that don’t look anything like humans. Like Ella, for example. She serves drinks at the Crown Coffee Bar in Singapore. She was built by Intel. What am I saying? It was built by Intel. Or shall we get to the point now where intelligent machines can only have female pronouns, just like ships and boats? My boat’s called Callisto, after the Greek nymph, and I don’t know any boats with male names. But anyway, The company behind Ella, the coffee barista, is Intel, and their UK spokesperson’s Trish Blomfield.
Speaker I: It’s appealing for it to look like a human up until a certain point, and then you hit this uncanny valley and it is no longer appealing. In fact, it’s downright creepy for it, for this artificial thing to look like a human or have human characteristics. And so you can reach that uncanny valley, and instead of having something that’s aesthetically pleasing, you have something that’s aesthetically not pleasing and creepy. There’s some things that as human beings we recognize. So if I move my head, you may move your head as well to see where I’m looking, and then that’s my cue to you that there’s something over there. So using those kinds of cues that humans recognize might be useful for a robot. So I’ve seen some robots that have something that’s kind— I guess you could say it’s a head, but it’s something that rotates to show you where they’re about to move. Or they have some— something, again, they’re not really eyes, they’re not cameras, but they’re an indication to the human population that they’re about to move in a certain direction., and that can be a safety idea or an ease of use idea. I’ll share with you one funny story though. I was at Shenzhen Airport and there was a robot that was super cute. It was on rollers, so it wasn’t walking, but it was rolling around very smoothly and it had quite big eyes painted on it and it was quite cute. And it was its job was to patrol the— it was a security robot that was doing patrolling and taking camera video. But the problem was it was so cute that everybody wanted to take a selfie with it. So, and it had this safety mechanism so that if somebody stood near it, it would stop because that would be a collision. So it had this collision avoidance. So everybody was trying to take a selfie. There’s this poor robot was unable to do its job of moving around because so many people wanted to take a selfie with it.
Speaker A: So how does the coffee dispensing robot actually look if it’s not at all human-like?
Speaker I: It’s very, actually very, the technologies are very advanced. It’s an arm, it’s advanced arm, so it moves in 6 axes. So, you know, 3 axes would be moving X, Y, and Z planes. With 6 axes, then you have a robot arm that can tilt and it can turn. For pouring coffee, you need to be able to tilt and turn, and to be able to serve it, you need those 6 axes. So you need the motion sensors, the motion controllers, the sensors so that it can precisely pick up coffee cups, place them in the right point and then serve them when they’re ready. So it’s got, that’s sort of how it looks as a robot arm. Some of the technologies that you can’t see are probably some of the more intelligent or connected parts of the design. So there is a connection, the robot is connected to an ordering system. Now the ordering system that Crown Coffee uses, that Ella uses, is you can order either via mobile phone where you have have an app which has a digital wallet, so you can order and you can pay by your phone. Or there’s also an option to be able to order via a touchscreen that then is also connected to the, the robot, the robot arm. There’s also connections from the robot system to the store’s supply chain. So within the solution, and there are cameras that are able to see. So Intel has RealSense camera, and then we have a Mobilius visual processing unit as part of the solution. And that, that camera plus the VPU allows Ella to be able to do things like count the number of people, do retail analytics, count people, estimate queue length, queuing time. I, I know that they’ve also experimented with using the camera to recognize VIP customers. And then in general, the camera looks for anomalies, anything that might be wrong in the coffee-making environment that might need to be addressed, maybe a spill or some other kind of anomaly.
Speaker B: While Ella’s cranking out 300 cups of coffee a day, just a couple of miles away, there are large yellow robot dogs, all called Spot, patrolling the parks and open spaces of Singapore.
Speaker J: Singapore.
Speaker B: They’re built by Boston Dynamics, the company that brought us those amazing dancing robots which are such a viral success on YouTube. The company was first bought by Google’s Alphabet and now belongs to the Japanese carmaker Hyundai. The Spot robots are spotting people who are not wearing masks, who are meeting in large groups or not socially distancing according to COVID-19 prevention rules. Spots are filming. They’re recording, observing, and deterring. They’re keeping the peace.
Speaker F: I like to think, and the sooner the better, of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think, right now please, of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think, it has to be, of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.
Speaker B: That poem by Richard Brautigan from 1967 inspired the title of Professor John Markov’s The Interpretive History of Robots. Markov’s the journalist in residence at Stanford, Silicon Valley’s university.
Speaker G: When I was writing that book, I realized that, you know, you— well, you begin in 1962 at Stanford, and if you look at the state of computing at that moment, there were two laboratories on either side of the Stanford campus. One was started by John McCarthy. It was called the Stanford, it was called SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And on the other side of campus, there was a, that same year, there was another laboratory created by another man, Douglas Engelbart, and he called his technology Intelligence Augmentation. So you had AI on one side of campus and you had IA on the other side. And that’s, you know, it’s both the, it’s both of, you know, a philosophical difference. Do we build machines to replace humans or do we build machines to extend humans? And of course that creates a paradox, ’cause of course you do both in either case, but it does speak to the values. And what’s ironic is if you go to the early ’60s and the dawn of interactive computing, McCarthy was seen as being at the very heart of computer science and Engelbart was kind of dismissed as this kind of vision visionary who was trying to create word processors and nobody thought of word processing as being a big deal. The irony is that Engelbart’s ideas went first to Xerox PARC and then they were borrowed, if you want to call it that, by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and they created the modern personal computing world that we live in. So Engelbart’s IA technology is best expressed by personal computing and of course Steve Jobs said it best when he referred to the personal computer as a bicycle for the mind, which I think is very evocative, and it gets at that relationship between humans and machines. McCarthy was interested in building thinking machines that would replace or duplicate human qualities. And now, of course, with the success of the machine learning technologies started in 2010, 2011, Silicon Valley, if it does nothing else well, invests very well and there’s a massive investment in machine learning technology and they’re applying it everywhere throughout the computing world. What’s interesting about where we are now is that, you know, a decade ago at Stanford, there was probably one ethics class on campus. Now you can’t turn around on campus without bumping into an ethics class. And I’m, you know, the point I made in “Machines Loving Grace” is that this is more about us as designers of machines and how we design the machines and how we design our relationship with the machines than it is about the machines themselves. And so I’m slightly hopeful because we’re creating a generation of designers who are deeply immersed in sort of ethical thinking about the machines they design. That said, the simplistic thing is, Oh, the machines are coming for our jobs. And there’s still a tremendous amount of that, that, and you know, I believed that for a long time until I ran into Danny Kahneman at a dinner once. He’s, you know, a Nobel Prize winning economist. Well, Kahneman, basically I was, I had my hair on fire because I’d been to China and I was saying the robots are coming, the robots are coming, they’re gonna steal all of our jobs. And Kahneman stopped me and he said, you know, we’ll be lucky if the robots come just in time. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he walked me through the demographics of the modern world, and that really changed my framing of the way I saw the relationship between humans and machines. We have a dramatically aging population almost everywhere in the world except for Africa. And in America, my God, you know, it’s Well, anyway, America, Asia, Europe, all of those parts of the world are aging. And so after I thought about that for a while, I realized that he was right. In China, you know, they don’t have enough, they don’t have a large enough workforce. They’re aging out. It’s a two-edged problem. The workforce is not large enough and they have an aging population and they don’t have enough people to care for them. And so I changed the question I asked in about 2015, 2016. I stopped asking, when will we have self-driving cars? And I began asking the question to roboticists, when will we have a machine that can safely give an aging human a shower? Nobody had an answer to that question. We still don’t have an answer to that question. And so I’m afraid for our generation, the machines are not gonna be here in time. We’re not gonna be watched over by machines of loving grace. So that really reframed framed the way I think about the question of whether machines are going to steal our jobs or not.
Speaker B: Caring androids, loving grace. Are we really ready to embrace these rubber-coated lumps of metal? Dr. David Levy certainly thinks so. He’s been saying this since 2007 when he published Love and Sex with Robots, a best-selling book that became his PhD thesis and spawned a series of annual international conferences. David Levy tells me humanity’s love affair with machines all started in Japan with a 1990s plastic pet.
Speaker J: The Tamagotchi was a very interesting product. It was developed in Japan and it was massively popular for a while. People were treating their Tamagotchis as pets or even relations. They were treating them with great love and respect.. And in Japan, for example, if your Tamagotchi died, you would post a eulogy to it on the internet. So, the Tamagotchi is a sort of forerunner in terms of human relationships with computer software. And when the Tamagotchi was so popular, it demonstrated, I think, quite convincingly that people could form emotional attachments to something that was software-driven. So when the idea of sex robots merged into the business world, and when I wrote my book and started giving papers on the subject at conferences, it was already the case that we knew that it was possible for people to become emotionally attached to, to robots. You talk about relationship.
Speaker B: A relationship by definition means that there’s something going on—
Speaker J: both ends?
Speaker B: Surely there isn’t, not with a piece of software.
Speaker J: It is just responding to your stimulus. Well, it’s behaving as though there is something at the other end with emotion. This raises the sort of interesting question which I think many people ask, you know, how can you have a relationship with something that isn’t alive? Well, I think people can because it’s really a question of how the software behaves. If the software behaves as though it finds you appealing, attractive, interesting, and so on, then there’s an argument which follows Alan Turing’s thinking, which says that you should treat it as though it does actually have those feelings for you. If it walks like a duck and looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you should treat it as a duck. And Turing, of course, had the idea that if something appears to be intelligent and behaves in a way that’s totally consistent with human intelligence, then we should accept that it’s intelligent. And in the same way, I believe that if a robot or a piece of software behaves as though it has emotional feelings for us, And if its behavior is completely consistent with that, then we should accept that it does, in some sense, have emotional feelings for us. The feelings are not feelings of the same sort you and I have. They’re feelings, they’re sort of robot feelings, ones and zeros. But it’s how they appear to be to us that’s really important.
Speaker B: Dr. David Levy. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, celebrating 100 years since the Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots was first performed in Prague. Next on Resonance FM, you can hear A World in London with DJ Richard. What’s next in the world of robots? War, that’s what. Next week, the European Parliament will vote on authorizing artificial intelligence for use in weapons systems. France has given permission for implanting AI in robotically enhanced soldiers’ bodies and has published its ethical guidelines for their deployment. John Markoff, who’s observed and written about robotics for even longer than I have, believes other nations are also building robo-troops, but keeping it quiet.
Speaker G: I do think that the issues which have been brought up, I think best by some of the British arm controllers, deal with military robots that can autonomously kill. Autonomous killing machines, I think, are a possibility. They’re actually real. Defensive autonomy is routinely deployed on the battlefield now, and offensive autonomy is coming. And, you know, the argument is that that has already initiated an arms race, a technology arms race, and that, you know, it has real consequences. I do worry about intelligent killing machines, artificially intelligent killing machines.
Speaker B: My— did I interview Brigadier General Boulding, who was one of President Trump’s advisers on this. He’s one of the people who warns and warns and warns about Chinese intentions and ambitions, who did remind me a little of General Buck Turgison from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. That seems to be the issue, doesn’t it? Because people say, well, hang on a moment, knights of old complained about the crossbow. They wanted the crossbow. Not used as a weapon of war because it went through their armor.
Speaker G: Yeah, I think, you know, I’m not an expert in this field, but the arms control community talks about technologies that actually are more stabilizing and technologies that are destabilizing. And I worry that these technologies will be destabilizing, which, and will actually accelerate an arms race and make war more likely. Rather than less likely. So the United States has begun deploying under Trump a weapons system called the LRASM, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which is all about our relations, our military-political relationship with China. Now, because of the increasing power of the Chinese military, US carriers are no longer safe close to the Chinese mainland. And so we have this weapons system that can can be launched from hundreds of, at least hundreds of miles away and can fly outside of human control to an enemy fleet. And then it can make independently make decisions at that point about what ship it attacks. So that’s right up against the question of whether it’s autonomous or not. And you know, there are people who argue that we’ve crossed the line. The Pentagon argues that that is actually is actually not an autonomous weapon system. It’s a semi-autonomous weapon system, which is all right under the American rubric framework right now. But the US has not completely banned the development of autonomous weapons. It’s a decision that’s made by the president and the Secretary of Defense.
Speaker B: One of the interesting points about this and about those systems is apparently a lot of psychological research has discovered that people are very, very unwilling about taking back control over autonomous weapons systems because they don’t want to be held responsible for the decision to take back control or to perhaps make the system fail and not kill someone.
Speaker G: Well, that’s interesting. Well, there are these points in history where humans have stayed in control and we’re alive as a species because of that. I mean, you know, both both in Cuba, and there was another, at least several issues where we could have gone to, you know, to a nuclear war, and we didn’t because of human decisions not to intervene and to double-check.
Speaker B: But that then becomes a big issue because when people talk about AI weapons systems, they tend to think about AI robotic systems like the gun system that you’re talking about. They don’t talk about the potential for a conflict to be launched by an AI system within a network, by a cyber weapon.
Speaker G: Well, yeah, no, cyber weapons are another part of the equation. They certainly have been developed by the United States and by, I’ve heard, dozens, if not hundreds of other countries. They are targeted at networks like financial networks, industrial networks, hospital networks. Yeah, you know, and so the question is, will cyber weapons make us more or less safe? Are they a stabilizing or destabilizing force in the world? I don’t have an answer to that question. It doesn’t make me feel more safe to think that there is Russian software that has been implanted all over the United States, and the same is true in other countries. I mean, I guess we’re back to mutually assured destruction. Mutually assured destruction. That’s the best you can say about that is that, you know, with guns held to both sides’ heads, either side will be unwilling to pull the trigger. That would be the most hopeful thing I could say. But then we’ve seen how close we came to war, to nuclear war in the past because that system of mutually assured destruction almost failed. Why would this be any different? No, I think, you know, and it’s all in the dark, right? It’s not public, it’s classified. We don’t know actually what kind of warfare is going on out there at this moment.
Speaker B: And we’ve also got this potential conflict in space which is fast developing with every single significant nation or nation wanting to be significant asserting its potential in space. I mean, the Indians were the latest ones to blow up one of their satellites.
Speaker F: Yeah, I agree, I agree.
Speaker B: Well, just as a final question then, obviously the end of Rossum’s Universal Robots, he said that, you know, the, the robots took over, that these synthetic beings took over and that humans were eradicated, and that they then tried to move into the next iteration. Adam and Eve, the, these two robots themselves tried to take things to to a higher level. You don’t seem to be very optimistic about this.
Speaker G: Well, there’s a question about this. There’s two ways of looking at the question. The first question is, how close are we to that reality? And the second question is, would that be a good thing or not? I mean, Marvin Minsky, who was a friend of John McCarthy’s and one of the founders of the field, used to sort of— his optimistic view of the machines when they took over would basically keep us around as pets. You know, I love that stuff because, as I said before, I read a lot of science fiction and I enjoy it immensely. But as my friend Paul Saffo likes to say, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. You know, I think that, you know, machine intelligence, machines as a species, I mean, maybe it’ll come more quickly from the work we’re doing in biological sciences than in computer science or in robotics. If I was gonna bet, if you wanted to sort of get me, keep me up at night and be afraid of something, I would worry about what we might be able to do with new genetic engineering techniques than anything that’s happening in the AI or CS field right now.
Speaker B: In Rossum’s Universal Robots, the universality disappears when different countries start to customize the androids and brand them with their national flags. Flags. Wars break out, and it’s the people who are the casualties. When the human race is reduced to its last survivor, the two most advanced androids, Primus and Helena, are faced with a difficult dilemma.
Speaker E: Helena puts a rose in Primus’s hair. Primus and Helena look into mirror and burst out laughing. Look at yourself! Laughter?
Speaker F: LAUGHTER!
Speaker E: Human beings! (Getting up.) Who has returned? Who are you? The Robot Primus. What? A robot? Who are you? The Robotess Helena. Turn around, girl. What? You are timid? Shy? (Taking her by the arm.) Let me see you, Robotess. (She shrinks away.) Sir, do not frighten her. What? You would protect her? When was she made? 2 years ago. By Dr. Gall? Yes, like me. Laughter, timidity, protection. I must test you further, the newest of Gaul’s robots. Take the girl into the dissecting room. Why? I wish to experiment on her. Upon Elena?
Speaker H: Of course.
Speaker E: Don’t you hear me? Or must I call someone else to take her in? If you do, I will kill you. Kill me? Kill me then. What would the robots do then? What will your future be then? Sir, take me. I am made as she is, on the same day. Take my life, sir. [Speaker:HELENA] No, no, you shall not! You shall not! Wait, girl, wait. [Speaker:PRIMUS] Do you not wish to live, then? [Speaker:HELENA] Not without her. I will not live without her. [Speaker:PRIMUS] Very well. You shall take her place. [Speaker:HELENA] Primus!
Speaker C: Primus!
Speaker E: [SOBBING] [Speaker:NARRATOR] She bursts into tears.
Speaker B: If you want to know what happens, well, you’ll have to read the play. It’s still in print thanks to Robert Weschler at Catbird Press in Connecticut. Or if you want to listen to an audio version, go to our website www.futureintelligence.co.uk where you can find a link to the radio broadcast of the play by LibriVox. The Čapek brothers had no happy ending. In 1938, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the prolific anti-Nazi playwright was a target for the Gestapo thought police. But their knock on his door came too late. Karel had already died of pneumonia. So they vindictively took his brother Joseph, the artist who was responsible for the word robot, It’s thought he died in Belsen concentration camp, but his remains have never been found. What happens next in our life? Whether we use robots to make love, war, or coffee— well, that’s up to us. We Brits don’t have representatives in Strasbourg on Monday to shape the European rules, Though we do have Lord Patel of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee with an important announcement coming soon on UK guidelines on the use of robots to look after the elderly. And the House of Lords Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Committee heard evidence this week from a panel of experts on the risks associated with emerging technologies and the ethical challenges of technological advancement. And the US will soon have a new president taking charge as Commander-in-Chief. What could possibly go wrong? That’s all for this edition of Password, written by Jane Wyatt and produced by Blue Buffery, with me, Peter Warren, and music by the German industrial rock band Kraftwerk. We’ll be back next month here on Resonance FM, and in the meantime, You can follow us on Twitter at Password Radio.
Speaker A: Thanks for listening. Goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, Please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.
