Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us LITERARY FREEWARE -- NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Oct 1993. F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other F&SF Science Column #9: "Robotica '93" We are now seven years away from the twenty-first century. Where are all our robots? A faithful reader of SF from the 1940s and '50s might be surprised to learn that we're not hip-deep in robots by now. By this time, robots ought to be making our breakfasts, fetching our newspapers, and driving our atomic-powered personal helicopters. But this has not come to pass, and the reason is simple. We don't have any robot brains. The challenge of independent movement and real-time perception in a natural environment has simply proved too daunting for robot technology. We can build pieces of robots in plenty. We have thousands of robot arms in 1993. We have workable robot wheels and even a few workable robot legs. We have workable sensors for robots and plenty of popular, industrial, academic and military interest in robotics. But a workable robot brain remains beyond us. For decades, the core of artificial-intelligence research has involved programming machines to build elaborate symbolic representations of the world. Those symbols are then manipulated, in the hope that this will lead to a mechanical comprehension of reality that can match the performance of organic brains. Success here has been very limited. In the glorious early days of AI research, it seemed likely that if a machine could be taught to play chess at grandmaster level, then a "simple" task like making breakfast would be a snap. Alas, we now know that advanced reasoning skills have very little to do with everyday achievements such as walking, seeing, touching and listening. If humans had to "reason out" the process of getting up and walking out the front door through subroutines and logical deduction, then we'd never budge from the couch. These are things we humans do "automatically," but that doesn't make them easy -- they only seem easy to us because we're organic. For a robot, "advanced" achievements of the human brain, such as logic and mathematical skill, are relatively easy to mimic. But skills that even a mouse can manage brilliantly are daunting in the extreme for machines. In 1993, we have thousands of machines that we commonly call "robots." We have robot manufacturing companies and national and international robot trade associations. But in all honesty, those robots of 1993 scarcely deserve the name. The term "robot" was invented in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, for a stage drama. The word "robot" came from the Czech term for "drudge" or "serf." Capek's imaginary robots were made of manufactured artificial flesh, not metal, and were very humanlike, so much so that they could actually have sex and reproduce (after exterminating the humans that created them). Capek's "robots" would probably be called "androids" today, but they established the general concept for robots: a humanoid machine. If you look up the term "robot" in a modern dictionary, you'll find that "robots" are supposed to be machines that resemble human beings and do mechanical, routine tasks in response to commands. Robots of this classic sort are vanishingly scarce in 1993. We simply don't have any proper brains for them, and they can scarcely venture far off the drawing board without falling all over themselves. We do, however, have enormous numbers of mechanical robot arms in daily use today. The robot industry in 1993 is mostly in the business of retailing robot arms. There's a rather narrow range in modern industry for robot arms. The commercial niche for robotics is menaced by cheap human manual labor on one side and by so-called "hard automation" on the other. This niche may be narrow, but it's nevertheless very real; in the US alone, it's worth about 500 million dollars a year. Over the past thirty years, a lot of useful technological lessons have been learned in the iron-arms industry. Japan today possesses over sixty percent of the entire world population in robots. Japanese industry won this success by successfully ignoring much of the glamorized rhetoric of classic robots and concentrating on actual workaday industrial uses for a brainless robot arm. European and American manufacturers, by contrast, built overly complex, multi-purpose, sophisticated arms with advanced controllers and reams of high-level programming code. As a result, their reliability was poor, and in the grueling environment of the assembly line, they frequently broke down. Japanese robots were less like the SF concept of robots, and therefore flourished rather better in the real world. The simpler Japanese robots were highly reliable, low in cost, and quick to repay their investment. Although Americans own many of the basic patents in robotics, today there are no major American robot manufacturers. American robotics concentrates on narrow, ultra-high-tech, specialized applications and, of course, military applications. The robot population in the United States in 1992 was about 40,000, most of them in automobile manufacturing. Japan by contrast has a whopping 275,000 robots (more or less, depending on the definition). Every First World economy has at least some machines they can proudly call robots; Germany about 30,000, Italy 9,000 or so, France around 13,000, Britain 8,000 and so forth. Surprisingly, there are large numbers in Poland and China. Robot arms have not grown much smarter over the years. Making them smarter has so far proved to be commercially counterproductive. Instead, robot arms have become much better at their primary abilities: repetition and accuracy. Repetition and accuracy are the real selling-points in the robot arm biz. A robot arm was once considered a thing of loveliness if it could reliably shove products around to within a tenth of an inch or so. Today, however, robots have moved into microchip assembly, and many are now fantastically accurate. IBM's "fine positioner," for instance, has a gripper that floats on a thin layer of compressed air and moves in response to computer-controlled electromagnetic fields. It has an accuracy of two tenths of a micron. One micron is one millionth of a meter. On this scale, grains of dust loom like monstrous boulders. CBW Automation's T-190 model arm is not only accurate, but wickedly fast. This arm plucks castings from hot molds in less than a tenth of a second, repeatedly whipping the products back and forth from 0 to 30 miles per hour in half the time it takes to blink. Despite these impressive achievements, however, most conventional robot arms in 1993 have very pronounced limits. Few robot arms can move a load heavier than 10 kilograms without severe problems in accuracy. The links and joints within the arm flex in ways difficult to predict, especially as wear begins to mount. Of course it's possible to stiffen the arm with reinforcements, but then the arm itself becomes ungainly and full of unpredictable inertia. Worse yet, the energy required to move a heavier arm adds to manufacturing costs. Thanks to this surprising flimsiness in a machine's metal arm, the major applications for industrial robots today are welding, spraying, coating, sealing, and gluing. These are activities that involve a light and steady movement of relatively small amounts of material. Robots thrive in the conditions known in the industry as "The 3 D's": Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous. If it's too hot, too cold, too dark, too cramped, or, best of all, if it's toxic and/or smells really bad, then a robot may well be just your man for the job! When it comes to Dirty, Dull and Dangerous, few groups in the world can rival the military. It's natural therefore that military- industrial companies such as Grumman, Martin Marietta and Westinghouse are extensively involved in modern military-robotics. Robot weaponry and robot surveillance fit in well with modern US military tactical theory, which emphasizes "force multipliers" to reduce US combat casualties and offset the relative US weakness in raw manpower. In a recent US military wargame, the Blue or Friendly commander was allowed to fortify his position with experimental smart mines, unmanned surveillance planes, and remote-controlled unmanned weapons platforms. The Red or Threat commander adamantly refused to take heavy casualties by having his men battle mere machinery. Instead, the Threat soldiers tried clumsily to maneuver far around the flanks so as to engage the human soldiers in the Blue Force. In response, though, the Blue commander simply turned off the robots and charged into the disordered Red force, clobbering them. This demonstrates that "dumb machines" needn't be very smart at all to be of real military advantage. They don't even necessarily have to be used in battle -- the psychological advantage alone is very great. The US military benefits enormously if can exchange the potential loss of mere machinery for suffering and damaged morale in the human enemy. Among the major robotics initiatives in the US arsenal today are Navy mine-detecting robots, autonomous surveillance aircraft, autonomous surface boats, and remotely-piloted "humvee" land vehicles that can carry and use heavy weaponry. American tank commanders are especially enthused about this idea, especially for lethally dangerous positions like point-tank in assaults on fortified positions. None of these military "robots" look at all like a human being. They don't have to look human, and in fact work much better if they don't. And they're certainly not programmed to obey Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. If they had enough of a "positronic brain" to respect the lives of their human masters, then they'd be useless. Recently there's been a remarkable innovation in the "no- brain" approach to robotics. This is the robotic bug. Insects have been able to master many profound abilities that frustrate even the "smartest" artificial intelligences. MIT's famous Insect Lab is a world leader in this research, building tiny and exceedingly "stupid" robots that can actually rove and scamper about in rough terrain with impressively un-robot-like ease. These bug robots are basically driven by simple programs of "knee-jerk reflexes." Robot bugs have no centralized intelligence and no high-level programming. Instead, they have a decentralized network of simple abilities that are only loosely coordinated. These robugs have no complex internal models, and no comprehensive artificial "understanding" of their environment. They're certainly not human-looking, and they can't follow spoken orders. It's been suggested though that robot bugs might be of considerable commercial use, perhaps cleaning windows, scavenging garbage, or repeatedly vacuuming random tiny paths through the carpet until they'd cleaned the whole house. If you owned robot bugs, you'd likely never see them. They'd come with the house, just like roaches or termites, and they'd emerge only at night. But instead of rotting your foundation and carrying disease, they'd modestly tidy up for you. Today robot bugs are being marketed by IS Robotics of Cambridge, MA, which is selling them for research and also developing a home robotic vacuum cleaner. A swarm of bugs is a strange and seemingly rather far-fetched version of the classic "household robot." But the bug actually seems rather more promising than the standard household robot in 1993, such as the Samsung "Scout-About." This dome-topped creation, which weighs 16 lbs and is less than a foot high, is basically a mobile home-security system. It rambles about the house on its limited battery power, sensing for body-heat, sudden motion, smoke, or the sound of breaking glass. Should anything untoward occur, Scout- About calls the police and/or sets off alarms. It costs about a thousand dollars. Sales of home-security robots have been less than stellar. It appears that most people with a need for such a device would still rather get themselves a dog. There is an alternative to the no-brain approach in contemporary robotics. That's to use the brain of a human being, remotely piloting a robot body. The robot then becomes "the tele- operated device." Tele-operated robots face much the same series of career opportunities as their brainless cousins -- Dirty, Dull and Dangerous. In this case, though, the robot may be able to perform some of the Dull parts on its own, while the human pilot successfully avoids the Dirt and Danger. Many applications for military robotics are basically tele-operation, where a machine can maintain itself in the field but is piloted by human soldiers during important encounters. Much the same goes for undersea robotics, which, though not a thriving field, does have niches in exploration, oceanography, underwater drilling-platform repair, and underwater cable inspection. The wreck of the *Titanic* was discovered and explored through such a device. One of the most interesting new applications of tele-operated robotics is in surgical tele-operations. Surgery is, of course, a notoriously delicate and difficult craft. It calls for the best dexterity humans can manage -- and then some. A table-mounted iron arm can be of great use in surgery, because of its swiftness and its microscopic precision. Unlike human surgeons, a robot arm can grip an instrument and hold it in place for hours, then move it again swiftly at a moment's notice without the least tremor. Robot arms today, such as the ROBODOC Surgical Assistant System, are seeing use in hip replacement surgery. Often the tele-operated robot's grippers are tiny and at the end of a long flexible cable. The "laparoscope" is a surgical cable with a tiny light, camera and cutters at one end. It's inserted through a small hole in the patient's abdominal wall. The use of laparoscopes is becoming common, since their use much reduces the shock and trauma of major surgery. "Laparoscopy" usually requires two human surgeons, though; one to cut, and one to guide the cable and camera. There are obvious potential problems here from missed communications or simple human exhaustion. With Britain's "Laparobot," however, a single surgeon can control the camera angle through a radio-transmitting headband. If he turns his head, the laparoscope camera pans; if he raises or lowers his head it tilts up and down, and if he leans in, then it zooms. And he still has his hands free to control the blades. The Laparobot is scheduled for commercial production in late 1993. Tele-operation has made remarkable advances recently with the advent of fiber-optics and high-speed computer networking. However, tele-operation still has very little to do with the classic idea of a human-shaped robot that can understand and follow orders. Periodically, there are attempts to fit the human tele-operator into a human-shaped remote shell -- something with eyes and arms, something more traditionally robotlike. And yet, the market for such a machine has never really materialized. Even the military, normally not disturbed by commercial necessity, has never made this idea work (though not from lack of trying). The sensory abilities of robots are still very primitive. Human hands have no less than twenty different kinds of nerve fiber. Eight kinds of nerve control muscles, blood vessels and sweat-glands, while the other twelve kinds sense aspects of pain, temperature, texture, muscle condition and the angles of knuckles and joints. No remote-controlled robot hand begins to match this delicate and sophisticated sensory input. If robot hands this good existed, they would obviously do very well as medical prosthetics. It's still questionable whether there would be a real-world use and real-world market for a remotely- controlled tele-operated humanlike robot. There are many industrial uses for certain separate aspects of humanity -- our grip, our vision, our propensity for violence -- but few for a mechanical device with the actual shape and proportions of a human being. It seems that our fascination with humanoid robots has little to do with industry, and everything to do with society. Robots are appealing for social reasons. Robots are romantic and striking. Robots have good image. Even "practical" industrial robots, mere iron arms, have overreached themselves badly in many would-be applications. There have been waves of popular interest and massive investment in robotics, but even during its boom years, the robot industry has not been very profitable. In the mid-1980s there were some 300 robot manufacturers; today there are less than a hundred. In many cases, robot manufacturers survive because of deliberate government subsidy. For a nation to own robots is like owning rocketships or cyclotrons; robots are a symbol of national technological prowess. Robots mark a nation as possessing advanced First World status. Robots are prestige items. In Japan, robots can symbolize the competition among Japanese firms. This is why Japanese companies sometimes invent oddities such as "Monsieur," a robot less than a centimeter across, or a Japanese boardroom robot that can replace chairs after a meeting. (Of course one can find human office help to replace chairs at very little cost and with great efficiency. But the Japanese office robot replaces chairs with an accuracy of millimeters!) It makes a certain sense to subsidize robots. Robots support advanced infrastructure through their demand-pull in electronics, software, sensor technology, materials science, and precision engineering. Spin-offs from robotics can vitalize an economy, even if the robots themselves turn out to be mostly decorative. Anyway, if worst comes to worst, robots have always made excellent photo-op backgrounds for politicians. Robots truly thrive as entertainers. This is where robots began -- on the stage, in Mr. Capek's play in 1921. The best-known contemporary robot entertainers are probably "Crow" and "Tom Servo" from the cable television show MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. These wisecracking characters who lampoon bad SF films are not "real robots," but only puppets in hardshelled drag; but Crow and Tom are actors, and actors should be forgiven a little pretense. Disney "animatronic" robots have a long history and still have a strong appeal. Lately, robot dinosaurs, robot prehistoric mammals, and robot giant insects have proved to be enormous crowd-draws, scaring the bejeezus out of small children (and, if truth be told, their parents). Mark Pauline's "Survival Research Laboratories" has won an international reputation for its violent and catastrophic robot performance-art. In Austin Texas, the Robot Group has won a city arts grant to support its robot blimps and pneumatically-controlled junk-creations. Man-shaped robots are romantic. They have become symbols of an early attitude toward technology which, in a more suspicious and cynical age, still has its own charm and appeal. In 1993, "robot nostalgia" has become a fascinating example of how high-tech dreams of the future can, by missing their target, define their own social period. Today, fabulous prices are paid at international antique toy collections for children's toy robots from the '40s and '50s. These whirring, blinking creatures with their lithographed tin and folded metal tabs exert a powerful aesthetic pull on their fanciers. A mint-in-the-box Robby Robot from 1956, complete with his Space Patrol Moon Car, can bring over four thousand dollars at an auction at Christie's. Thunder Robot, a wondrous creation with machine-gun arms, flashing green eyes, and whirling helicopter blades over its head, is worth a whopping nine grand. Perhaps we like robots better in 1993 because we can't have them in real life. In today's world, any robot politely and unquestioningly "obeying human orders" in accord with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics would face severe difficulties. If it were worth even half of what the painted-tin Thunder Robot is worth, then a robot streetsweeper, doorman or nanny would probably be beaten sensorless and carjacked by a gang of young human unemployables. It's a long way back to yesterday's tomorrows. .