Timothy Birdnow

Isaac Asimov is often considered the father of robotics.

More precisely, Dr. Asimov took a pre-existing concept - of artificial people designed to do work - and fleshed it out so we could have an idea of how it would work.

Asimov wrote dozens of robot stories. His 1983 novel "The Robots of Dawn" featured the humaniform robot R. Daneel Olivaw and his human detective partner Elijah Bailey. Remember that title; it will serve you later in this tale.

The original concept of robots goes back to a 1924 play entitled "Rossum's Universal Robots". In it an oppressed class of artificial men rise up in a glorious communist revolution against their evil capitalist masters. It was an allegory for socialist revolution. The author - Karel Capek - wrote a morality play, not a science story or vision of the future.

(The word robot is of Slavic derivation and means worker. In Russian to work is to Robat. Robateli are workers po-Russkie.)

He was borrowing from older stories, most notably Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was the story of a robot made from dead body parts. Shelley herself was borrowing from the old legend of the Golem.

Always these stories discuss the morality of doing such a thing, and are not really interested in the creature itself as a human invention.

Asimov changed all that; he thought of robots first and foremost as tools (at least in the early days) and tried to look at them as engineered devices.

So, what would an engineer put into a mechanical man? There would be three primary objectives 1.safety 2.service 3.quality and warranty.

Safety would be tantamount; it would be disastrous to have such a machine go wild and kill people. So there is an absolute safety system in place. This was the First Law of Robotics (a term coined by Asimov). A robot could not harm a human being or allow one to be harmed through inaction. The second, service, said a robot had to obey orders given it unless it conflicted with the first law. And the third law said a robot had to protect it's existence and safety provided it did not conflict with the first two.

Asimov wrote a series of delightful tales around robot psychology; robots trying to fulfill these functions in a chaotic universe.

And in the Universe of New York City Police detective Elijah Bailey one very unique android - humanoid robot - would lead to a partnership that would change the fate of the galaxy.

See, fifty worlds around the Earth's solar system were settled with the use of robots. The societies that grew on these "spacer" worlds competed with the teeming masses of Earth, which had rejected robots for economic reasons (took too many jobs) and the creep-out factor. Bailey would lead the settlement of new worlds by humans without robots. And it would be the robots, becoming humanlike enough to understand, who would aid Bailey in ending the spacer way of life and eliminating the machines.

So what does this have to do with us?

Yesterday I was in the local Schnucks grocery store (a local chain here in St. Louis) to stock up. I hadn't been to the store in quite a while and the cupboard was bare. I've been avoiding going to the store because the local grocery chains all have mask mandates, and frankly with my heart condition I can't get enough air wearing those things.

At any rate I was at the end of one aisle and simply had to lift my mask. I was sucking for air and felt faint, as though I may pass out. I lifted the mask and suckled joyously on the sweet oxygen of the fresh, God-given air when a, well, I don't know how to describe it, but it was a robot, came zipping up to me.

It stood about four and a half feet tall. It looked like a sign, except it moved with a quiet electronic zip.

It whizzed right up to me, stopped, seemed to "look" at me in a rather scolding fashion, then wheeled to the right down the aisle.

What in the world?

I needed some canned fruit and blast if that mechanical monstrosity didn't go right to the canned fruit section. It stopped there, blocking me from the shelf. It began to move in a way suggesting it was looking over the goods.

Each time I tried to get at the cans it moved to block me. I was getting quite lathered up about it; the presumptuous pinhead kept moving to block my access. I now understood why Dr. Smith was always insulting the robot on Lost in Space; it was quite intolerable! I was threatening to fistfight it at the last.

(I know Cathy; only I would get in a fight with a robot at the grocery store!)

I got up close to eat (preparing to strangle the electronic idiot) and got close enough to read a sign on it which said it was an inventory robot.

Inventory robot!

When I was younger I worked at a grocery store and worked up to lead co-manager. I did my share of inventory. Also, there were companies that came in to help with inventory on occasion. Now they had a machine to do it.

That meant a lot of human jobs lost. And this thing apparently didn't need to be supervised in any way; it knew how to find the shelves and how to count them. Oh, and how to annoy customers, but that won't stop progress in this modern era where customers are akin to spare parts.

Our technology is reaching that point. We are starting to build robots of a kind similar to those foreseen by Asimov.

And like Asimov's robots these apparently had the beginnings of the three laws, or at least the machine knew not to run me over, and kept moving when I tried to get past it. It was that savvy.

Or, who knows; maybe it really DID want to scold me for having my mask off?

At any rate, I wish this encounter had happened in the dishwashing liquid aisle; then it would truly have been the Robots of Dawn.

How long before the cashiers are replaced? The butchers? The produce guys?

It's a matter of time.

There was a science fiction story I read many years ago (and I don't remember the title or author) about a world where you received a great honor by being selected to work for a day. Nobody worked and everyone wanted to. They had all they needed but were unfulfilled because the machines did it all. How long before we reach that point?

Probably never, but robotics does mean fewer and fewer jobs are going to be available and most likely people will just work part-time. Most people can't function that way. They needs something to fill their time. (I don't, but then you see what I do to fill MY time.) And idle hands are the Devil's playthings. I would argue the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa and the rest of the unrestful activism is in no small part a coefficient of the rise of leisure time. Americans (and others in the West) have too much time on their hands and nothing to give their lives fulfillment. So they invent grievances to make it feel they are suffering like their parents did. They seek out causes - no matter how fatuous - to make them feel they are "making a difference". It certainly is why the Global Warming issue gets any traction; young people like Greta Thurnberg are desperate to find meaning for their empty lives.

Robotics will only accelerate that process.

Asimov saw this. He argued the "spacer" societies would decay and crumble and eventually disappear as the citizens of those societies would lose the grit and determination needed to survive. Like hothouse flowers they would wither under adversity. Life with robots would be too easy for them.

I think Asimov was right.

I think this mechanical moron I encountered was just the beginning of the rise of the machines.  But how do you turn down free workers? Ones who need no pay, no sleep, no benefits, no decent working conditions?

The robots of dawn may be the dusk for our civilization.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:16 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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