War with the Robots

War with the Robots Harry Harrison

A WORD FROM THE (HUMAN) AUTHOR…

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. Instead of a radio this machine could play records: Brahms at night, Sousa in the morning. And instead of switching off at night after a fixed interval, the music could continue playing softly until the master was completely asleep — the robot determining this fact by a thermocouple in the bed that would detect the lowering of body temperature that accompanies sleep. If master wished to arise at dawn there would be no need for him to check the almanac every night for the correct time; a simple photoelectric cell sensitive to light would take care of that. All of these gadgets — instead of being built into a black box — could be housed in a metal torso, the thermo-couple in the end of one finger, the photoelectric cells in place of eyes. Instead of internal switching it could reach out a hand to turn on the music, even pull up the shade if need be.

I personally feel no burning desire to have a truncated metal man hovering over my bed at night, metal finger gently prodding my flesh and unsleeping eyes watching for the sight of dawn. Though in essence it would still be the same machine that now turns the music on and off for me.

Call my attitude emotional — but don’t call it exceptional. We have long tended to anthropomorphize our mechanical devices; giving our cars names, cursing, coaxing — and occasionally kicking — recalcitrant machines. We are even getting used to the services of robots and are beginning to take them for granted too. What child has not been fascinated by the moron-level robot in the refrigerator who turns the light off when we close the door? Does the robot always turn it off? That train of thought can keep one up nights figuring out ways to find out.

Have you ever ridden in one of those completely automatic elevators they are beginning to install in the big office buildings? A single master control starts and stops an entire bank of elevators, programming frequent trips when the traffic is heavy and fewer in the slow periods. Passengers are counted and the doors closed when the car is full. Speed and braking are adjusted to the weight so that the doors will always open flush with the floor outside. Some of the elevators even have a recorded voice (appropriately firm) that orders the hoggish rider to stay clear of the doors if he is preventing their closure. The elevator-controlling robot is built into the wall and sends and receives all of its commands electronically. If we wanted it to conform to the classic picture of a robot it would do the same job — though perhaps not as efficiently — in the form of a machine man who snapped its fingers at the metal operators of the cars. All of this would be very dramatic, yet would not alter the basic robot-control situation in the slightest.