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Robots on the brain. They stalk through the movies and menace on the television screen, focused on an end, an instruction, an action with superhuman determination. Devoid of will or feeling, they move as a stone set in motion forever down a hill, endowed with a surplus of kinetic and potential energy. At the robot’s essence, it merely does; no thought, only action.
Robots have occupied a special place in the popular imagination for more than eighty years. They have been servants, slaves, rebels, masters, friends, teachers, pupils, metaphors, and clichés. We have endowed them with humanity, only to strip that humanity away; we have made them curiously similar to us, a biped with an enlarged cranium set to work at physical and intellectual tasks; we have cast them as fantastically alien, monstrous things sprung from the id. The creative extension of a separate, unthinking, unfeeling worker has become a real way in which we map the future.
Just as the far-fetched idea of humans in space planted a kernel in our hearts that grew into a less glamorous reality, so has the robot. We have delegated work deemed menial, distasteful, and mentally unchallenging to it. Karel Capek envisioned this destiny in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the Czech play that coined the word. In it, a group of men discover a process by which to physically assemble biological beings more efficient than humans, stripped of emotions and pain yet physically identical, and amass a fortune selling these automatons to foreign countries. The countries put the robots to work as laborers in factories, as typists in offices, as playthings, and, eventually, as fully disposable soldiers in wars. Capek’s simple story (man creates robot; robot kills man) outlines the dangers of pursuing scientific progress without first analyzing the consequences.
The concept caught on quickly. Landmarks include Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a dystopic science-fiction film in which a robot is created to impersonate and deceive a revolting worker class; Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a book later adapted into the film Blade Runner, where life-like robots mingle with humans and assert their own humanity; The Day the Earth Stood Still, a science-fiction film from the 1950s, where an omnipotent robot is endowed with the power over the life and death of civilizations for the sake of peace; Star Wars, the 1977 blockbuster film where a comic duo of robots are used as the storytelling device; and Terminator, a low-budget 1985 film showcasing a menacing robot assassin. Robots have also been featured in countless novels, television shows, comic books, and films in the years between these and since.
They’ve also made appearances in real life. We’re not in danger of an army of robots marching on our cities or a mechanized assassin coming after our leaders, at least not literally. Only recently have scientists managed to build a robot that can negotiate some of the terrain with two legs, and maybe fetch the morning newspaper from the lawn. But the robot has penetrated our society as a servant, and has taken our workload in many instances, for good or bad. For about two hundred dollars, anyone can buy a device that will vacuum the floor without human aid. In factories, robots have replaced human workers on the assembly line. In the lab, automated workstations pipette solutions at a speed and accuracy no human could approach. They sit on bench tops, rectangular platforms stacked neatly with magnets, multiwell plates, reagent troughs, pipette tips, heating elements, and an array of tools for manipulating these many parts into science. This is not Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still, trudging through Washington, D.C., vaporizing weapons and inspiring terror in the population.
Though this does not mean there is nothing at all compelling about them; these robots are not pedestrian tools we accept and mostly ignore. Like the robot of the popular mind, they do exactly what we tell them to, and a fully automated workstation can generate more data than a person can sort through in just one day. Alternately, this precision can lead to real mistakes with real consequences. One erroneous solution transfer can ruin as many as 96, 384, or 1536 samples. When programmed correctly, it shows the greatest care, gently touching a pipette tip against the rim of a plate well to discard the last drop of solution. No human can make this small touch the same way with each transfer, the most careful touch each and every time. A pipetting head moves quickly over a soundtrack of whirring gears and belts, surging pumps and the rush of moving liquids. Look closely, and you can see the stuff of science fiction there, lurking beneath the surface of repetition and utilitarian design.
Still, a robot cannot design an experiment. It cannot order supplies, open boxes, unscrew the bottles of reagents and pour them out into the appropriate troughs. It does not clean up after itself. It will execute what few tasks we can give it with a minimum of complaining, but those tasks are very few. A laboratory robot cannot greet us when we enter the room, and it can’t follow us outside to look at a honeybee hovering over a brilliant flower in the bright summer sunshine.
The robot isn’t doing all of our work for us, and should that future arrive, it will arrive only because we have allowed it. Robots do not think; they only act. The quality of the work they give us cannot exceed the quality of the work we give them; this says everything about our attempts at automating a servant. These extensions of ourselves will not complain or hesitate as we might, and will not work through the brilliant highs and exasperating lows we experience. Stripped of these inconsistencies, the robot impartially demonstrates how far we’ve come and points how far we can go. Its ultimate lesson is that it can accomplish so much just by doing. We can think on top of that; just imagine the things we will do.
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