Homo Robotica

When we imagine our technological future, we always think of robots and our image of future robots are predominantly governed by what many sci-fi movies have developed for us over the years. Often these robots are enswathed in shiny steel with blinking lights, set to task by some ominous-looking buttons and wires. These movie robots speak using the most abstruse words from some encoded unabridged dictionary and they always somehow in the end summarily take over the direction of human thought and consequently, the destiny of human lives. I think we humans are curious that way in that we wish to extend our senses through robotics but at the same time, in at least one form of art, in the movies, we express fear that our robotic "extensions" will become more powerful than we are and defeat our humanity. Are our fears warranted by research currently being done on robotics?

Let us get out of the movies for a while and see where some important researches in robotics are headed. I have selected two. In a new book called The New Humanists. Science at the Edge (Barnes and Noble Books, NY 2003) edited by John Brockman, Rodney Brooks wrote an article entitled "Making Living Systems." Brooks is the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Fujitsu professor of Computer Science at MIT. He admitted that his "midlife research crisis" is to get to understand the principles in living systems, in its levels, such as in cells and life forms such as creatures and their functioning organs and to mimic these principles in robots. And since algorithms (set of computational procedures) are what now seem to be the best tools we have in understanding nature, we seem to think that these principles contained in the "living" are wholly translatable as algorithms and could explain what complex living things essentially are. But aren’t we missing something if we start with tools we already have instead of letting the systems teach us what powers it possesses? This is what Brooks wants to find out. Thus, their research at the Lab is focused on things such as learning neural patterns in the brain, the mechanisms involved in multi-cellular reproduction, growth from simple to more complex living systems and trying to translate these principles in the form of algorithms so that "artificial intelligence" will not really be artificial since it will involve the "natural" principles that scientists would have come to understand in living systems. He wrote that they are still far from crossing the chasm in homing in on the principles that essentially differentiate something that is "alive" from what is not but that the dream is to be able to do so one day and even literally cloth these algorithms with materials far less rigid than the traditional steel or even silicon, to make them more yielding to the concept of what is alive – closer to probably how skin, scale or fur, looks and feels. For instance, they want to be able to build a robot that like living systems can repair itself, metabolize or even seek its own energy for self-maintenance. But before you start entertaining ideas of Frankenstein proportions, please note that the examples he cited is that of a robot they have developed that wanders the halls of their building to find electrical outlets it can plug into to charge itself. Other than that, the rest of the examples he cited seem to still be strictly computational and lack the "x-factor" that would give them the stamped and sealed quality of "being alive." But they are nevertheless remarkable and wondrously helpful like the robots that can go down oil pipes at depths with such pressures and temperatures and practically manage oil production down there. Another set of examples includes the computer-vision techniques used in medical procedures which give real-time, three-dimensional pictures of the brain during surgery.

In another article by Sandra Blakeslee recently published in the New York Times (Oct. 14, 2003), I came across progress in Duke University in another area of robotic research: thought-controlled robotics. This involved a monkey with electrodes implanted in its brain successfully moving a robot’s arm as if it were its own arm. Apparently, motor plans in the brains of monkeys have been studied well enough to know that the robotic movement is indeed the intended movement of the monkey. The article acknowledged that this development obviously held promise for paralyzed humans. What made me think critically was the not quite unexpected information in the article that funding for this thought-controlled robot came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which, in fact, had already imagined a robotic warrior in its 25-year vision of the future. I am aware of robots that detect landmines so that humans would not have to risk life or limb to do so but to have a robot controlled directly by someone’s thoughts in times of conflict should send shivers to our core as human beings. It gives a whole new edge to the phrase "at the speed of thought." A robotic warrior of the future will, needless to say, do far more than threaten to raise its arm. I am fascinated and grateful that technology has given us the tools to know and touch our world that we could not achieve with our bare human senses but to use technology to separate thought from the very places/persons/creatures affected as the consequence of the thought, particularly thoughts of war, drastically severs the essential link between the technology we develop and the responsibility it entails. Historians like Will and Ariel Durant have cautioned us about "enlarging our instrumentalities without improving our purposes."

I think it will do us well to heed the historians’ advice.

I am sure that there are other interesting and important developments in robotics out there. So far, it just seems to me, that our humanity, in our characteristic ennui, anxieties, fears and restlessness, has gotten far ahead of the reach of the kind of robots we have actually developed so far. Brooks, as a scientist, wants to get to the heart of what makes a living thing "alive" and so far, it would seem that what makes a thing alive is more than computation. But how far more? This is what disturbs those who are not comfortable with the scientific tradition of trying to find things out and so we imagine an army of Frankensteins and fear a takeover. With thought-controlled robotics, we overwhelm it with complex human notions/purposes of conflict even before we move the experiment beyond monkeys.

I am inclined to lapse into the arts when deeply and intimately confronted by these possibilities that attempt to explain living nature which includes my humanness. I am no more comfortable being explained away in my total nature as a "clock" by Descartes than as a "self-regulating, self-organizing, self-maintaining" system by James Lovelock in his Gaia Hypothesis or as an entity that is capable of producing "the quantum effects in the microtubules of our neurons" (that is how the mathematician Roger Penrose defined "thought"). I would like to know and understand the physical world but I also find it essential that I be able to sit in the words in Neruda’s ocean and know myself in reflection as insisted and played by the ebb and flow of the tides. Science could map humans as a species but to understand and cultivate our humanity, I think it takes both science and poetry.