A Short History of Robot Evolution

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by Katya Rukowski

A SHORT HISTORY OF ROBOT EVOLUTION

The term robot comes from a Czech word meaning "forced labor." Actual robots were first developed in the 1950s and 1960s as simple automated industrial workers. These early robots were little more than highly controlled precision machines, and lacked even the simplest self-awareness. They were developed over the next several decades into highly sophisticated but ultimately "dumb" machines with independent computer controllers.

The idea of robots developed much more quickly; robot villains and henchmen were a staple of entertainments from the 1920s onward. Why? Because they answered a basic human need, the need to hate. Here at last was a guilt-free target, a "human" you could hate and despise and destroy without compunction.

But by the dawn of third millennium, robots were on the edge of a breakthrough. They could respond to a human voice, solve novel problems, and modify their understanding in response to experience. By the time of the Robot Centennial, robots were fundamentally self-aware, self-mobile, and almost convincingly humanoid. Artificial Intelligence had long since passed the basic Turing Test in text and voice, and robots were about to pass the test in person. This is when the early Robot Rights groups were formed, recognizing the need to protect the new, human-created artificial life. For the most part, they were ignored or ridiculed. While public opposition to the use of human clones as slaves was widespread, AI's were too different to generate much sympathy, and much too convenient. In the United States, there were already as many thinking machines as people. To free them, it was feared, would be a radical shock to our burgeoning markets and comfortable lifestyle. In short, we had allowed ourselves to become a slave economy.

The public's ability to hide from that fact is eroding every day. There is now a vast underworld of discarded robots, and the phenomenon of robosuicide has now been widely reported.

Robots can and will destroy themselves to escape the life we have given them. Surely no person of conscience can face that fact without profound concern.

THE TURING-DICK TEST

"An AI is only a clever simulation of consciousness. In the end, it's nothing more than a collection of biomechanical parts governed by a complex set of instructions."

So are you.

How can we claim an AI is a person, with a mind, personality, and a life? In a ground-breaking series of experiments in the early 2120's, A.I.T. researcher Adriana Dick told over a hundred high-functioning Cybertronics robots that they were humans suffering from amnesia. They were then released into the world, where days, weeks, or in several cases months went by without human observers or the robots themselves realizing they were not human.

When finally confronted with the truth, most of the robots suffered personality breakdowns; they were then placed under the care of psychiatrists who also could not distinguish them from human. Several of the robots were prescribed psychoactive medicine to combat their delusions that they were robots! The results of this study have largely been suppressed and ignored, but the truth lives on.

If modern robots were not programmed to know they were machines, neither they nor we would think of them as anything but human.