Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2001), "Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species", Kybernetes, Vol. 30 No. 9/10, pp. 1333-1341. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2001.30.9_10.1333.3

This is a large‐format glossy production, lavishly provided with dramatic colour photographs, that will no doubt be a welcome Christmas present to many budding scientists and a conversation piece on coffee tables and in corporate reception areas. The authors have travelled widely, in Europe, USA and Japan, to obtain the pictures and to interview robotics pioneers. Some of the pictures have little connection with serious robotics, and show gadgets for creating effects on the stage or for publicity. A number show “face robots” devised because of the current interest in having machines show emotion, and lending themselves to striking pictures including the one on the front cover of the book. On the other hand, others of them do show important developments, along with accounts of the visits of the authors to the laboratories and their discussions to obtain the views and motivations of the robot developers.

The number of sites that were visited is over one hundred, chosen on account of references in the literature, recommendations of other workers, and personal impressions. There is no claim to exhaustive coverage, but a survey on this scale cannot fail to be valuable. Despite the glossy production and its suggestion of sensationalism, the descriptions of what was demonstrated at the sites are sound and informative. In a final section on “Methodology” the second‐named author explains how they went about collecting the material and there are also technical details of cameras and lighting used to obtain the magnificent pictures.

The accounts are grouped under six headings. The first section, called “Electric dreams” is particularly stimulating and controversial and introduces the enigmatic title of the book. More will be said about it below. The second section has the title “Robo sapiens” and contains descriptions of robots with some claim to be humanoid, of which the most impressive by far is the Honda P3 walking robot, developed in secret over ten years and at enormous expense by the Honda company. The advantages of having a robot look like a human are discussed, with particular reference to the “Cog” device of Rodney Brooks at MIT. Among the projects of the leg laboratory of MIT there is one on prosthetic devices for amputees, conducted by a researcher who lost parts of his limbs due to frostbite suffered on nearby Mount Washington.

A third section has the title “Bio logical” with accounts of a remarkable number of robots imitating creatures including snakes, lizards, crabs and cockroaches. These have various motivations, including that of gaining understanding of the biological prototype (an aim that is also mentioned in connection with work on legged locomotion and on social interactions). In one project an artificial cockroach has been built that models the original in great detail. A crab‐like robot is useful for walking underwater, like the real crab, and clearing mines. Then a fourth section is on “Remote possibilities” with descriptions of planetary rovers, and also robots to assist astronauts with external repairs to their crafts. In an emergency, a robot can be ready much more quickly than the human to go out into space. A rough‐terrain device of the planetary‐rover type is shown that has been developed to search in rubble for earthquake victims.

The fifth and sixth sections are on “Work mates” and “Serious fun”. The former includes robots used in surgery, as well as helpers for disabled people, and other domestic robots, and an automatic vacuum cleaner that continuously collects hair from the floor of a barber’s shop. One of the items in the latter section refers to the “Robot Wars” type of entertainment, and also a variety of robot dolls and pets is shown.

The controversial part of the book is the section on “Electric dreams” where various speculations about the future of robotics are compared. The predictions are mostly gloomy. There is a reminder that in the play by Karel Coapek that introduced the word “robot” the robots finally rose in revolt, and a number of more recent writers have visualised robotic take‐over. These include Marvin Minsky as well as Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University. Warwick seems to have somewhat modified his original stand, and now visualises the demise of humans as we know them and their replacement by hybrids that are part human and part robot, resulting from intimate coupling of the biological nervous systems to the electronics.

A more benign view is attributed to Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon, who sees robots as the saviours of mankind when the planet becomes uninhabitable. Robots are not visualised as rescuing people bodily, but as preserving genetic information that makes humans effectively immortal and able to re‐emerge where conditions may be favourable.

These suggestions of hybrids are the basis of the enigmatic title of the book, and in a Glossary there is the definition:

Robo sapiens. A hybrid species of human and robot with intelligence vastly superior to that of purely biological mankind; will begin to emerge in the twenty‐first century.

All this is of course controversial, to put it mildly. A more immediate and believable threat is attributed to the inappropriately‐named Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, who sees the ready availability of robots as offering devastating opportunities to terrorists and other mischief‐makers.

A few of the applications featured in the book have military connections. There is the crab‐like mine‐clearing robot, and a model plane suitable for surveillance (or spying, depending on the point of view), and a remotely controlled gun with associated remote surveillance for law enforcement. There is no mention of smart weapons of the cruise missile kind, which represent a development, at a government level, of the kind of danger referred to by Bill Joy, and a total rejection of the First Law of Robotic Behaviour proposed by Isaac Asimov, to the effect that no robot should harm a human being.

My own feeling is that the main threat from robots is the enormous scope they offer for the indulgence of man’s inhumanity to man, a threat that is tangible and immediate and irrespective of esoteric questions like the possibility (and the meaning) of machine consciousness.

I have a reservation, not completely formulated, about theories of machine take‐over, in that they assume a form of omnipotence for the cerebral kind of intelligence that is accessible to introspection and has been partially passed to machines. If Lovelock (1979) is right in his Gaia hypothesis, human survival depends on regulation of the environment by the totality of life on earth, with micro‐organisms and algae playing an important part. There is a sense in which human intelligence can be seen as superior, since it allows Lovelock and others to analyse these mechanisms, but so long as they are incompletely understood we should beware of being too arrogant about the power of human and machine intelligence, even in combination. It would be a bizarre twist to the story if the ultimate factor giving machines superiority was that they showed more regard for Gaia than did their biological creators.

In any case, this book gives a stimulating review of many of the issues as well as of the current state of the art in advanced robotics and is an attractive art work in itself.