MACHINE DREAMS:

HAL on Earth (Erin Aubry Kaplan, September 27, 2002, LA Weekly)

Perhaps because its military growth was curtailed after World War II, Japan has always embraced its technology and its machines, and robots are especially well-regarded -- Japanese comics consistently portrayed them as friends and superheroes, and gave them human names. Hence the Japanese dominate robotics, and their national obsession to produce a perfect humanoid is much like the international scientific race to crack the DNA code. The West, for all its innovations, has largely shied away from the idea, likely hampered by a Judeo-Christian wariness of playing God by creating robots -- or anything else -- in our own image. The very term robot is rooted in European pessimism: the Czech word for slave or "forced laborer," it was taken from a 1921 play by Karel Capek called Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R., a cautionary tale about robots who rise up over time and destroy their human masters. The American cultural references to robots have been generally dark, especially in film -- HAL 9000 in "2001," the belligerent replicants of Blade Runner, the tortured man-machine hybrid of RoboCop. It may be that, after centuries of oppressing and exploiting others, Westerners are projecting in robots a fear of karmic comeuppance that may lie just around the corner. [...]

The folks at Evolution Robotics and elsewhere expect that one day soon the world will be set up for personal robots, which they view as not something up for debate but simply the way of productivity. It's this Zen-ish outlook that drives Bill Gross' sunny brand of American ingenuity; he made his money with Internet concerns like Citysearch.com, and he lost no time in determining the next technological big thing. Gross agrees there's a big cultural fear of robots, but doesn't expect that's going to stop anything. "You want a robot to be like a Palm Pilot, not a human," he muses. "Over the next 20 years we'll be having discussions about the morality of artificial intelligence just like we're having discussions now about the morality of cloning and genetics." Those discussions might still be going when we get around to robots, but McNally believes robots will prove their worth quickly in so many ways -- in hospitals, in homes, on the battlefield -- that ancient doubts about them will be largely dispelled. "We can't imagine the necessity of robots in our lives now, but look at the microwave," she says. "Look at where it ended up." Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, went a step further in declaring that "in the new millennium, we will become our machines." The unexpectedly heartening corollary is that our machines are becoming us.

One fails to see why that's heartening. There's a supremely creepy, though well-written, book that Professor Reynolds once suggested we cultural conservatives would dislike, Diaspora (1997) (Greg Egan 1961-). Indeed, it portrays a repellant future where Man has disappeared and the remaining beings are robots or computer programs. It's interesting to see how the beings' lack of mortality and morality robs their story of any drama, even though they achieve some remarkable things. Because they have no free will and no reason to fear death they are profoundly unsympathetic. Give me humans in all their tragedy, comedy, and occassional glory any day of the week. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 30, 2002 10:51 PM