THE FIRST ROBOTS

R.U.R THE FIRST ROBOTS

The term Robot was invented in the early 1920s by Czech playwright Karel Čapek.

Čapek later popularized the term in his play, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a tale of a factory that builds robots to displace human labor from production but the robots eventually rebel against their human creators. In later literature and films, robots were made of metal, however, in the 1920s Čapek made his robots of flesh and blood. Here is an excerpt from the play:

DOMIN: Noon. We have to blow the whistle because the Robots don't know when to stop work. In two hours I will show you the kneading trough.

HELENA: Kneading trough?

DOMIN: The pestle for beating up the paste. In each one we mix the ingredients for a thousand Robots at one operation. Then there are the vats for the preparation of liver, brains, and so on. Then you will see the bone factory. After that I'll show you the spinning mill.

HELENA: Spinning mill?

DOMIN: Yes. For weaving nerves and veins. Miles and miles of digestive tubes pass through it at a time.

In R.U.R the robots were made of flesh and blood. Fritz Lang was one of the artists that introduced the image the Robot as mechanical in his 1927 film - Metropolis

Maria as mechanical (she is later transformed into the appearance of a human being)

In the contemporary period, the robot is more likely to be associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and science fiction movies than political rebellions and human freedom. The depoliticisation of the concept accompanied various social transformations, such as the growth of consumerism, by the 1950s, technological items became available to many people at prices they could afford, and were decreasingly less synonymous with the oppressive machines in factories (though this political debate still continued to be debated as a political issue up until the 1970s in Western Europe). In this context the robot became associated with labor saving and liberating mechanical devices, but this, of course, is not the only story.

The robot has always acted as a metaphor (and now a reality) to allow us to reflect on the social order and social relations as well as what is human. Historically, there have always been attempts to downgrade human beings; either to consider them as animals or machines, particularly in order to justify domination by certain classes of people or because human beings themselves have lost faith in their own capacities and increasingly feel like machines, see James Heartfield's book on explaining the contemporary degradation of the human subject Death of the Subject.

In the 1900s, the average working day for an ordinary working man in Western Europe and the USA was around 10 hours a day (this deferred from industry to industry), mainly in terrible, inhuman conditions. The introduction of machinery into the workplace mechanized human working practices, to the extent, that humans became mere appendages of machines. But it was not merely that human beings worked at machines, of course humans worked at machines the last two centuries prior at the advent of the industrial revolution, what was significant about the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, was the period of political radicalization that accompanied the working process. Hence the robot speaks to these developments. Mechanizing man was transformed into a scientific practice when the theories of Frederic Taylor and his Principles of Scientific Management were published in 1911.

The robot belongs as much to politics as it does to AI and science fiction, though it is associated more with the latter in the contemporary period. In novels and cinema the form and content of the robot changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, robots were portrayed as labor saving devices that would free humans from drudgery. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the robot in cinema and literature, were often portrayed as disembodied objects, such as "HAL: 9000" by Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: Space Odyssey and later personified by Stanley Kubrick in the film of the same name. The impact of computers, particularly personal computers switched the emphasis from mechanical human-like beings to computational objects in many science fiction renderings of the robot. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the robot made a come-back again in embodied humanoid forms, but this time, it was often associated with killing machines, rather than labor saving devices or human helper.

By analyzing what the robot has signified historically and culturally it is possible to gage with perceptions of what it means to be human and social relations.

SOME HUMANOID/HUMAN-LIKE ROBOTIC PROJECTS WORLDWIDE

Since the 1990s a number of academic and private corporate institutions have begun making robots that one might conventionally see in science fiction, that is robots with a humanoid or human like form. In Japan, Honda was probably the first company to build a humanoid robot ASIMO. The work in Japan has led the way in solving engineering problems of replicating human movement in a machine, but the robots, in many cases do not work autonomously. At MIT's former artificial intelligence Lab, two projects Cog and Kismet pioneered new approaches to human-like robots, such as human-machine sociable interaction and embodied cognition. Kismet is now at MIT's museum of science and Cog is due to depart to a museum at the end of December 2003, but the ideas generated through these projects continue to be explored in new areas, such as Babybot in Italy, Yale University, USA and at the Media Lab at MIT guided under the supervision of Dr Cynthia Breazeal (famed for her work on Kismet) Leonardo project.

What Can Intelligent Robots Tell Us About What It Means To Be Human?

Contemporary roboticists, such as Rodney Brooks (head of CSAIL) believe that humans are just machines, and only have special qualities to the extent that they are special kinds of machines Flesh and Machines. When robots first appeared in literature, not only did the robots look like human beings, but they were even made of bones, flesh and organs. Despite this, Capek and Lang didn't think there machines were human, despite having the appearance and form that was almost identical biologically to humans. Today, the idea of human uniqueness is being challenged by a number of roboticists, artificial intelligence scientists and social theorists.

Scientists Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil both argue that human intelligence will be surpassed by machines. Anthropologist, Donna Haraway argues that humans are Cyborgs -part-human and part-machine. Thinkers affiliated to the Actor Network School of Thought believe that the human-non-human divide is problematic and challenge the notion that humans are unique. Two interesting books that address the some of these questions by exploring the cultural and political implications of science, technology and human beings are, Man, Beast and Zombie: What science can and can't tell us about human nature by Kenan Malik, and Francis Fukuyama in his book on "posthumanism", see a review at the New York Times here Our Posthuman Future.