Accidental Blogger

Having always been fascinated by the near-human characteristics of Isaac Asimov’s robots and his Three Laws of Robotics in his science fiction novels and stories, I was intrigued to see an article about the interactions of computer generated ‘chatbots’ Alice and Jabberwocky in this Discovery magazine article. Are we getting a step closer to an actual direct interaction between a ‘thinking’ machine and a human? Check it out for yourself at this link by typing your questions and comments to Alice, the Chat Bot.

A sample conversation might run as follows:

Human :"What is 2 plus 2?"

Alice : "4"

Human : "What is 8/2?"

Alice: "Get a calculator!"

( I will confess that I still have not been able to get Alice to tell me what 8 divided by 2 yet, no matter what logical loops I throw at her. She just turns ornery and changes the subject or attempts to flirt, which is worse.)

Chatbots like Alice aside, robotics is a tremendously interesting field, comprising ‘in the machine’ pseudorandom software programs, all the way to over 800,000 industrial robots performing in several manufacturing industries, to surgical robots and more.

Industrial robotics is mostly  about programming a microprocessor that controls an assemblage of servomotors, sensors, moving mechanical arms, perhaps on wheels – trying to write sophisticated programs to make the machine replicate tasks that the animal kingdom had already mastered eons before.But the robotic advantage lies in the complete repeatability of those moves without any variation. So we have a complete array of industrial robots that automate tasks that would be too boring/imprecise/dangerous for humans to perform in many industries.

So what is a robot? Why does the common perception of the robot always tend to be stereotypical? I’m sure that those images of R2D2, C3PO and Johnny Five have so pervaded the pop-consciousness, that a whole field of intriguing developments gets obscured from the general public.

We have this dry but precise technical definition of a robot (ISO 8373):

"An automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose,manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications."

A more interesting, but ambiguous definition comes from Joseph Engelberger, credited as a pioneer in industrial robotics:

"I can’t define a robot, but I know one when I see one."

Someone thought of once interviewing Asimov about his famous robots and laws and this is what he had to say:

"Robotics has become a sufficiently well developed technology to warrant articles and books on its history and I have watched this in amazement, and in some disbelief, because I invented it.

No, not the technology; the word.

In October 1941, I wrote a robot story entitled "Runaround," first published in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in which I recited for the first time, my Three Laws of Robotics. Here they are:

   1. A robot must not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
   2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where those orders would conflict with the First Law.
   3. A robot must protect its own existence, except where such protection would conflict with the First or Second Law."

All the more amazing, since by his own admission, he knew nothing formally about robots:

"Alas, I am not an expert, and I never have been. I don’t know how robots work in any but the vaguest way – For that matter, I don’t know how a computer works in any but the vaguest way, either. I have never worked with either robots or computers, and I don’t know any details about how robots or computers are currently being used in industry.

I don’t take pride in this. I merely present it as a fact. I would like to know all about robots and computers but I can only squeeze so much into my head, and though I work at it day and night with remorseless assiduity, I still only manage to get a small fraction of the total sum of human knowledge into my brain. "

But one thing even Asimov hadn’t dreamed of, for an author, is now a reality. Longpen is a robotic book-signer that allows the author to interact with fans at a distant site in real time and sign books to them.  Incidentally, this comes from the brainwave of Booker prize-winning author Margaret Atwood(), an idea that has both enthusiasts and detractors.

"The imminent arrival of the gadget, called LongPen, has prompted fears it could kill off the grand tradition of the book-signing tour. Those long hours spent on trains and motorways, trudging the publicity circuit as writers to press the flesh with the people who pay their wages, could be a thing of the past.

Yet the threat has led to a backlash by other authors. D J Taylor called it "an absolutely feeble idea – another example of fatuous modern technology", while novelist Jilly Cooper believes "if the signing tour were to die off, it would be a tragedy"."

While perhaps not a true robot, in that it requires larger agency of a human for the interaction to be complete, the same could be said even for simple domestic robots like the Roomba and Scooba, drudgery minimizers that nevertheless need some amount of prep and cleanup, since they haven’t figured out how to make those empty themselves.