How to Survive a Robot Invasion

Rights, Responsibility, and AI

David J Gunkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138370715
• eBook ISBN: 9780429765261
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this short introduction, David J. Gunkel examines the shifting world of artificial intelligence, mapping it onto everyday twenty-first century life and probing the consequences of this ever-growing industry and movement.

The book investigates the significance and consequences of the robot invasion in an effort to map the increasingly complicated social terrain of the twenty-first century. Whether we recognize it as such or not, we are in the midst of a robot invasion. What matters most in the face of this machine incursion is not resistance, but how we decide to make sense of and respond to the social opportunities and challenges that autonomous machines make available.

How to Survive a Robot Invasion is a fascinating and accessible volume for students and researchers of new media, philosophy of technology, and their many related fields. It aims both to assist readers' efforts to understand a changing world and to provide readers with the critical insight necessary for grappling with our science fiction-like future.

1
Introduction

Whether we recognize it or not, we are in the midst of a robot invasion. The machines are now everywhere and doing virtually everything. We chat with them online, we play with them in digital games, we collaborate with them at work, and we rely on their capabilities to manage all aspects of our increasingly complex digital lives. Consequently, the “robot invasion” is not something that will transpire as we have imagined it in our science fiction, with a marauding army of evil-minded androids either descending from the heavens or rising up in revolt against their human masters. It is an already occurring event with machines of various configurations and capabilities coming to take up positions in our world through a slow but steady incursion. It looks less like Blade Runner, Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica and more like the Fall of Rome.

This book investigates the significance and consequences of this invasion in an effort 1) to map the increasingly complicated terrain of the twenty-first century, 2) to assist students, teachers, and researchers in their efforts to understand and make sense of a changing world, and 3) to provide readers with the information and critical insight necessary for responding to and taking an active role in shaping the future.

1.1 Robots

Before we get too far into it, however, it would be a good idea to begin by getting a handle on the basics … beginning with terminology. Despite what one might think, robots are not the product of scientific R&D. Robots are originally the result of fiction, specifically a 1920 stage play titled R.U.R. or Rossum’s Universal Robots and written by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek (2009). In Czech, as in several other Slavic languages, the word robota (or some variation thereof) denotes “servitude or labor,” and “robot” was the word that Čapek used to name a class of manufactured, artificial slaves that eventually rise up against their human makers (Figure 1.1). But Čapek was not, at least as he tells the story, the originator of this designation. That honor belongs to the playwright’s brother, the painter Josef Čapek, who suggested the word to his brother during the time of the play’s initial development (for more, see Gunkel 2018, 15). Since the publication of Čapek’s play, robots have infiltrated the space of fiction. But what exactly constitutes a robot differs and admits of a wide variety of forms, functions, and configurations.

Figure 1.1 A scene from the play R.U.R., showing three robots.

Source: Public domain image provided by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capek_play.webp.

1.1.1 Science Fiction

Čapek’s robots were artificially produced biological creatures that were humanlike in both material and form. This configuration persists with the bioengineered replicants of Blade Runner and Blade Runnner 2049 (the film adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and the skin-job Cylons of Ronald Moore’s reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Other fictional robots, like the chrome-plated android in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and C-3PO of Star Wars, as well as the “hosts” of HBO’s West-world and the synths of Channel 4/AMC’s Humans, are humanlike in form but composed of non-biological materials. Others that are composed of similar synthetic materials have a particularly imposing profile, like Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot (Figure 1.2), Gort from The Day the Earth

Figure 1.2 Theatrical poster for the film Forbidden Planet (1956) and featuring the imposing figure of Robby the Robot.

Source: Public domain image provided by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Forbiddenplanetposter.webp.

Stood Still, or Robot from the television series Lost in Space. Still others are not humanoid at all but emulate animals or other kinds of objects, like the trashcan R2-D2, the industrial tank-like Wall-E, or the electric sheep of Dick’s novella. Finally, there are entities without bodies, like the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey or GERTY in Moon, with virtual bodies, like the Agents in The Matrix, or with entirely different kinds of embodiment, like swarms of nanobots.

When it comes to defining the term “robot,” science fiction plays a significant and influential role. In fact, much of what we know or think we know about robots comes not from actual encounters with the technology but from what we see and hear about in fiction. Ask someone—especially someone who is not an insider—to define “robot,” and chances are the answer that is provided will make reference to something found in a science fiction film, television program, or story. This not only applies to or affects outsiders looking-in. “Science fiction prototyping,” as Brian David Johnson (2011) calls it, is rather widespread within the disciplines of AI and robotics even if it is not always explicitly called out and recognized as such. As the roboticists Bryan Adams et al. (2000, 25) point out: “While scientific research usually takes credit as the inspiration for science fiction, in the case of AI and robotics, it is possible that fiction led the way for science.” Because of this, science fiction is recognized as being both a useful tool and a potential liability.

Engineers and developers, for instance, often endeavor to realize what has been imaginatively prototyped in fiction. Cynthia Breazeal (2010), for example, credits the robots of Star Wars as the inspiration for her pioneering efforts in social robotics:

Ever since I was a little girl seeing Star Wars for the first time, I’ve been fascinated by this idea of personal robots. … I knew robots like that didn’t really exist, but I knew I wanted to build them.

Despite its utility, for many laboring in the field of robotics this incursion of pop culture and entertainment into the realm of the serious work of science and engineering is also a potential problem and something that must be, if not actively counteracted, then at least carefully controlled and held in check. As the roboticist Alan Winfield (2011, 32) explains:

Real robotics is a science born out of fiction. For roboticists this is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because science fiction provides inspiration, motivation and thought experiments; a curse because most people’s expectations of robots owe much more to fiction than reality. And because the reality is so prosaic, we roboticists often find ourselves having to address the question of why robotics has failed to deliver when it hasn’t, especially since it is being judged against expectations drawn from fiction.

In whatever form they have appeared, science fiction already—and well in advance of actual engineering practice—has established expectations for what a robot is or can be. Even before engineers have sought to develop working prototypes, writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined what robots do or can do, what configurations they might take, and what problems they could produce for human individuals and communities. John Jordan (2016, 5) expresses it quite well in his short and very accessible introductory book Robots:

No technology has ever been so widely described and explored before its commercial introduction. … Thus the technologies of mass media helped create public conceptions of and expectations for a whole body of compu-mechanical innovation that had not happened yet: complex, pervasive attitudes and expectations predated the invention of viable products.

1.1.2 Science Fact

So what in fact is a robot? Even when one consults knowledgeable experts, there is little agreement when it comes to defining, characterizing, or even identifying what is (or what is not) a robot. In the book Robot Futures, Illah Nourbakhsh (2013, xiv) writes: “Never ask a roboticist what a robot is. The answer changes too quickly. By the time researchers finish their most recent debate on what is and what isn’t a robot, the frontier moves on as whole new interaction technologies are born.”

One widely cited source of a general, operational definition comes from George Bekey’s Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Implementation and Control: “In this book we define a robot as a machine that senses, thinks, and acts. Thus, a robot must have sensors, processing ability that emulates some aspects of cognition, and actuators” (Bekey 2005, 2). This “sense, think, act” paradigm is, as Bekey (2005, 2) explicitly recognizes, “very broad,” encompassing a wide range of different kinds of technologies, artifacts, and devices. But it could be too broad insofar as it may be applied to all kinds of artifacts that exceed the proper limits of what many consider to be a robot. “The sense-think-act paradigm,” as John Jordan (2016, 37) notes, “proves to be problematic for industrial robots: some observers contend that a robot needs to be able to move; otherwise, the Watson computer might qualify.” The Nest thermostat provides another complicated case.

The Nest senses: movements, temperature, humidity, and light. It reasons: if there’s no activity, nobody is home to need air conditioning. It acts: given the right sensor input, it autonomously shuts the furnace down. Fulfilling as it does the three conditions, is the Nest, therefore, a robot?

(Jordan 2016, 37)

And what about smartphones? According to Joanna Bryson and Alan Winfield (2017, 117) these devices could also be considered robots under this particular characterization:

Robots are artifacts that sense and act in the physical world in real time. By this definition, a smartphone is a (domestic) robot. It has not only microphones but also a variety of proprioceptive sensors that let it know when its orientation is changing or when it is falling.

In order to further refine the definition and delimit with greater precision what is and what is not a robot, Winfield (2012, 8) offers the following list of qualifying characteristics:

A robot is:

1. An artificial device that can sense its environment and purposefully act on or in that environment;
2. An embodied artificial intelligence; or
3. A machine that can autonomously carry out useful work.

Although basically another variation of sense-think-act, Winfield adds an important qualification to his list—“embodiment”—making it clear that a software bot, an algorithm, or an AI implementation like IBM’s Watson or DeepMind’s AlphaGo are not robots, strictly speaking. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the different ways in which “robot” has been defined, explained, or characterized. What is clear from this sample, however, is that the term “robot” is open to a range of diverse and even different denotations. And these “definitions are,” as Jordan (2016, 4) writes, “unsettled, even among those most expert in the field.”

Our task, at this stage, is not to sort this out once and for all but simply to identify this terminological difficulty and to recognize that what is under investigation is as much a product of innovation in technology as it is a rhetorical construct. For this reason, words matter. What we call these things and how they come to be described in both fiction and the scientific literature are important to how we understand what they are, what they might become, and what they do and/or are capable of doing. What this means for us, then, is that our understanding of “robot” and the “robot invasion” is something of a moving target. We will need to focus attention not just on different kinds of technological objects but also on the way scientists, engineers, science fiction writers and filmmakers, journalists, politicians, critics, and others situate, conceptualize, and explain this technology in and by language and other methods of representation. What is called “robot” is not some rigorously defined, singular kind of thing that exists out there in a vacuum. It is something that is socially negotiated such that word usage and modes of communication shape expectations for, experiences with, and understandings of the technology and its impact. Consequently, we need to be aware of the fact that whatever comes to be called “ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Default Settings
• 3 The New Normal
• 4 Responses
• Index