War with the Robots

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WHEN MOST PEOPLE HEAR THE WORD robot, they have a reflexive metal picture of a mechanical man, all creaking joints and glowing eyes. This really wasn’t what Karel Capek had in mind when he invented the word for his play R.U.R. soon after the First World War. His robots— Rossum’s Universal Robots—were flesh and blood, though artificially made, and identical with normal placental-people in every way except for their complete lack of emotions. The new word robot filled a need, and was gratefully seized by the science fiction writers and soon mutated to be- come the mechanical man with the steel skin. (Capek’s flesh- and-blood robots are now called androids.) At the same time, in applied engineering, robot has become an inclusive term for an entire new family of gadgetry.

Just as tools and weapons — hammers, saws, swords and such — are a direct extension of man’s physical abilities, robots are an extension of the higher and more abstract functions. The robot pilot, who flies the plane for far longer periods than the human pilot, has delicate powers of discrimination and choice. Even the first crude models could detect and correct deviations from level flight before a human pilot could even sense them, while the newer, sophisticated models turn and bank the plane at the touch of a single button. This process of sensing and deciding is what separates the robots from the insensate machines. An alarm clock is a machine — but an automatic clock-radio is a robot. It may not look like one, but it has the functions. It soothes its master to sleep with soft music, then turns off the sound until the correct time in the morning when he should be awakened. There would be no trick at all to enlarging its field of operation.

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