Čapek’s robots appear as distorted doubles of ourselves. They are, as specified in the stage directions, “dressed like people,” their faces “expressionless” and their eyes “fixed”; they bring to mind in this way both automata and corpses, possessed of the familiar otherness of the living dead. The robot genocide of the play’s third act, written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, is more or less explicitly positioned as a reflection of Europe’s imperial ceremony of technologically enhanced bloodshed, as an acting out of the “human values” the robots have learned from their creators. When Alquist, the last surviving human, asks the leader of the robots why they have wiped out every other living person, he is told, “You have to kill and rule if you want to be like people. Read history! Read people’s books! You have to conquer and murder if you want to be people!”
The robots in Čapek’s play are a nightmare of future technology born out of the terror of present humanity. “Nothing is stranger to man,” as Alquist puts it, “than his own image.” And so these first fictional robots reveal the way in which our technologies reflect back on us the values out of which they are forged—“more horrid even,” as Frankenstein’s monster says of himself, “from the very resemblance.”
What is this fascination of ours, this obsession with our own destruction by consequence of our ingenuity? Daedalus, that old artificer, is the symbol and spirit of this understanding of ourselves, of our ambitions—the shadow of the waxwing slain, cast darkly across history, plummeting.
Artificial superintelligence, I was repeatedly told, was a dangerous prospect precisely because of how unlike us it would be, how inhuman, how immune to anger and hatred and empathy. But a sidelong reading of this cryptic eschatology suggests itself: perhaps this fear of what might be done to us by our most sophisticated technology, by our last invention, is a kind of sublimated horror at what we have already done to the world, to ourselves. We are already, many of us, controlled in ways we barely reflect on by machineries we barely understand; and the history of science and technology, at its best and at its worst, is a history of the conquest of nature, of the curing of diseases and the eradication of vast numbers of species. And so perhaps this apparition of a vengeance wreaked upon us by our own evolutionary successor is an expression of an existential shame. Perhaps it is a transfigured form of original sin, a return of the repressed, a neurotic avatar of some deeper terror. Nothing stranger to us than our own image.
Mere Machines
ROBOTS WERE, IN one way or another, our future. This much I had been given to understand by the transhumanists I had spoken to, the foretellings of the future I had heard. If you were to believe Randal Koene or Natasha Vita-More or Nate Soares, we were ourselves going to be robots, our minds uploaded to machines much stronger and more efficient than our primate bodies. Or we were going to live increasingly among machines, ceding more and more of our work and our lives to their authority and order. Or they were going to make us obsolete and replace us as a species.
I would sit at breakfast and watch my son play with the little windup robot toy I had brought him back from San Francisco, its Frankensteinian lurch across the table toward the fruit bowl, and I would wonder what role actual robots would play in his future—how many of the careers I imagined for him would even exist in twenty years’ time, how many of them would by then have been lost to total automation, the final dream of corporate techno-capitalism.
He intercepted me in the hallway one day, having watched two or three back-to-back episodes of a cartoon called Animal Mechanicals.
“I’m a walking machine,” he said, and shuffled robotically in a circle about my legs.
It seemed a strange thing to say, but then again more or less everything he said was a strange thing to say.
I’d been thinking a lot about robots, but I had never seen an actual robot. Not, as it were, in the flesh; not, as it were, in action. I’d been thinking a lot about robots, but I didn’t know what it was, exactly, I’d been thinking about. And then I heard about a thing called the DARPA Robotics Challenge, an event at which the world’s foremost robotics engineers gathered to set their creations against one another in a series of trials designed to test their performance in human environments, in situations of extreme peril and stress.
I’d seen it described by The New York Times as “Woodstock for robots,” and I wanted to witness it for myself.
Aside from the considerable prestige of winning the DARPA Robotics Challenge, the ultimate victor, or its makers, stood to receive a million dollars in prize money from the competition’s eponymous benefactor. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the wing of the Pentagon responsible for the development of emerging technology for military purposes. The organization, which was set up by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 as a response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, has a history of originating transformative technologies. With its ARPANET project in the late 1960s, for instance, DARPA laid down the technical foundations of the Internet. GPS, the very technology by which my Uber driver efficiently piloted me from West Hollywood to Pomona for the event, was also a DARPA innovation: a tool of war by which I increasingly navigate the world. According to its own strategic plan, DARPA’s explicit purpose is “to prevent technological surprise to the US, but also to create technological surprise for our enemies.”
The more fascinated I became by the transhumanist movement, and the more I learned about the various innovations to which these people were tethering their hopes for a posthuman future, the more I kept coming across references to DARPA, and its funding of these potentially transformative technologies: brain-computer interfaces, cognitive prosthetics, augmented cognition, cortical modems, bioengineered bacteria, and so forth. DARPA’s overall objective these days, it seemed, was transcending the limits of the human body; specifically the human bodies of American soldiers.
The event at the Fairplex, a vast outdoor events venue in Pomona, constituted the finals of a contest that had been running since 2012; but it was also a celebration of the fruitful union of defense and corporate and scientific interests, a military-industrial pageantry. The whole thing was aimed, in the words of the event’s director, Gill Pratt, at expediting the development of semiautonomous robots capable of performing “complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments.”
Its immediate inspiration was the hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, a catastrophe that might have been significantly mitigated by robots capable of negotiating environments designed for human bodies. At a briefing that morning, a press guy named Bradley addressed an art deco ballroom full of DARPA employees and media people, informing them that humanitarian disaster relief was “one of the core missions of the US military,” and that humanoid robots were an increasingly significant dimension of this mission.
“If you could double the number of joints in your arm,” he said, “think of all the different ways you could open a door.”
I was given a press pack that contained a color printout illustrating the eight tasks the robots were obliged to complete: Drive Utility Vehicle, Exit Utility Vehicle, Open and Go Through Door, Locate and Close Valve, Cut Through Wall, Surprise Task, Rubble (Clear Debris or Walk on Rough Terrain), and Climb Stairs.
What I saw, when I took my seat in the grandstand overlooking Fairplex’s racetrack, was a series of stage sets representing several identical iterations of a kind of generic industrial disaster zone: brick walls, artificially distressed “DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE” signs, cartoonishly large red levers (this, it turned out, was the day’s Surprise Task), wall-mounted valve wheels, gauntlets of heaped and broken concrete. Each of these mock-ups was the setting in which a given robot had to accomplish a suite of tasks that, for any minimally competent human being, would be utterly straightforward, but which for these rude mechanicals constituted a rigorously demanding sequence of technical challenges.
A small red utility vehicle was being driven along a sandy track, h
altingly navigated between a pair of red plastic safety barriers, by a robot with what seemed to be a camera rotating slowly where its face should be. The robot was not sitting in the car, but rather standing on a footplate by the passenger side door, reaching across the interior of the vehicle to steer with a long, clawlike arm. The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.
“He’s really chugging along here,” said the man. At the opposite end of the desk was a smiling woman with short silver hair, wearing a blue polo shirt, likewise branded; this was Arati Prabhakar, DARPA’s director.
“Wow, that’s terrific to see!” she said.
I found it difficult to accommodate the sight of this pleasant-looking woman, smiling fondly at the driving robot, with what I knew about the organization she led. When I thought of DARPA, I thought, among other things, of its administration of the so-called Information Awareness Office, exposed by the former CIA employee Edward Snowden as a mass surveillance operation organized around a database for the collection and storage of the personal information (emails, telephone records, social networking messages, credit card and banking transactions) of every single resident of the United States, along with those of many other countries, all of which was accomplished by tapping into the user data of marquee-name tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Google—the corporate proprietors of the sum of things that might be factually and usefully said about you, your information.
“Look at him go!” said Prabhakar now, as the robot rounded the second safety barrier, bringing the car over a line in the sand, and gently to a halt in front of the door through which the industrial disaster zone stage set was to be accessed by means of knob-turning. “That’s fun!”
“This is like the Super Bowl of robots,” said the announcer. “It’s tremendously exciting.”
“Yes,” said Prabhakar, chuckling. “We hope to spark fires. That’s what we’re doing here: trying to create this groundswell of excitement about robotics, so as to push the development of the technology forward.”
The disaster-response application of this technology was the narrative that the DARPA brass kept pushing throughout the weekend, but Prabhakar was not reticent when it came to the topic of the eventual military deployment of these machines. “In the military context,” she told an interviewer, “our warfighters have to do incredibly dangerous tasks as a core part of their missions. As robotics technology advances and we can harvest it to help alleviate those challenges for our warfighters, that’s absolutely something we’ll be looking to do.”
The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated caution, toward the door; these movements it performed in the manner of a prodigiously shitfaced man intent on demonstrating that he had only had a couple of sherries with dinner. And then for ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, precisely nothing happened. Perhaps there had been a break in the wireless communication channels linking the robot with its team of engineers, huddled around their bank of screens in a hangarlike building off to the rear of the racetrack; these network dropouts were a deliberate tactic on DARPA’s part, a built-in component of the competition intended to test the robots’ level of autonomy, their ability to go about their business without need of remote micromanagement.
The robot I was watching was, I learned from the announcer, the creation of Pensacola’s Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and his—or its—name was Running Man. (This, I realized with a small numinous thrill, was the very robot that had appeared on the cover of that week’s Time, a copy of which I’d bought in Heathrow Airport the previous morning, before boarding a plane whose in-flight entertainment package, I may as well tell you, included no fewer than four robo-centric film options: Big Hero 6, an animated children’s movie about a young boy and his robot friend; Ex Machina, an enjoyably creepy film about a Dr. Moreauvian Silicon Valley billionaire who holes himself up in a remote and hyper-secure mansion with a coterie of beautiful female sex-bots; Chappie, a just-about-watchable South African sci-fi romp about a police robot that gains sentience and falls in with a gang of armed robbers; and a bargain-basement B movie called Robot Overlords, which concerned the invasion of the Earth by tyrannical robots from outer space, and which starred a scenery-devouring Sir Ben Kingsley, whose fee I would guess accounted for much of the film’s budget.) Running Man continued not running, or walking, or moving in any perceptible way at all, for an impressively long time. And then he, or it, did conspicuously move: the arm that had been poised in front of the doorknob finally made contact with its target and caused it to turn, and all of a sudden the door had swung inward, and the robot was beginning to make its cautious piston-legged way into the room, and the assembled crowd of tech enthusiasts and DARPA employees and U.S. Marines and young fathers with their children burst into a volley of cheers and applause, and the announcer, in exactly the kind of decorously enthused tone you’d expect from a golf commentator on ESPN, declared “another point for Running Man, who is now making his way—very smoothly, I might add—through the room.” On the Jumbotron behind the stage, the image of the moving robot gave way to a gigantic animated graphic confirming that Running Man, and its team of furiously industrious backstage engineers, had just successfully completed the door-opening-and-room-entering stage of the course, and had indeed accordingly been awarded a point.
In the row in front of me, a boy of about ten turned to his father and announced in a casually authoritative tone that this was “by far one of the most interesting robots I’ve ever seen.”
All that warm and festive Friday morning, I watched robots of various designs and abilities attempt to complete these tasks, and was entertained beyond all reasonable expectation by the spectacle. This was due in part to the competitive structure and sporting tenor of the event: the scoreboard and the live commentary, the Jumbotron and sideline engineer interviews, the pervasive American balm of hot dogs and popcorn. But mostly, it was due to the unanticipated element of slapstick, the weird confluence of high tech and low comedy.
I saw a robot stand perfectly still for fifteen minutes before succumbing to a powerful tremor at the knees and pitching over sideways, as though felled by some terrible seizure in its circuitry; I saw a robot finally succeeding in opening a door, and then falling through the frame to land flat on its serene titanium face; I saw a robot reach out to turn a valve wheel, miss its target by two or three inches, and claw the empty air in a counterclockwise direction before plummeting headfirst along the vector of its turning. I saw a great many robots collapsing backward in the attempt to walk up a stairs to nowhere, and a great many more brought low by the gauntlet of rubble, to be stretchered out on literal stretchers by teams of hard-hatted engineers.
The obvious implication of all of this, and on some level the rationale for the whole event, was that, although our technologies tend to be quite good at performing tasks beyond our own capabilities—flying at great heights and speeds, for instance, or processing massive amounts of data—they tend to be quite bad at doing things we do without thinking, like walking and picking up objects and opening doors, things that are really extraordinarily complex and demanding.*1
As such, the driving component of the competition proved to be far less problematic than the subsequent exiting of the vehicle—a distinct task in its own right, ruefully referred to by the engineers as “egress.” As the announcer suavely pointed out, egress was so difficult for the robots that many of the competing teams chose to go ahead and skip the whole thing, sacrificing a point to save time and money. (As amusing as it is to watch a robot pitch over headfirst while attempting to extricate itself from the driver�
�s seat of a doorless SUV, these pratfalls can amount to a significant setback for their wranglers. The robots who made it as far as the finals cost anything from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars to make, and so reparation of the damage caused by falls was an expensive business, and also a time-consuming one.)
But as I watched these visions of technological ingenuity and military-industrial power falling arse over tip in the effort to perform apparently simple tasks, I began to wonder whether this incidental spectacle of physical comedy was not, in some sense, central to the whole enterprise—whether the unspoken or unconscious intention here might not be to raise the robots to the level of humans not merely in terms of physical capability, but to elevate them in other ways, too. Because there is something deeply human, and humane, about the relationship between the body undergoing a pratfall and the body observing. There is cruelty in this laughter, but also empathy. These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.
I thought of a line from Henri Bergson’s book Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic—a line that, perhaps precisely because I had never quite understood it, had stayed with me in the years since I had first read it. “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body,” he wrote, “are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” I found the robots’ pratfalls comical, in other words, not simply because in their forms and their failures they resembled humans, but because they reflected the strange sense in which humans were themselves mere machines.
To Be a Machine Page 12
