Robots and our Future lalit@ri.cmu.edu

Warning - This is a very unrobotic page motivated by Robotics


In the ongoing quest to make smarter and cheaper machines, i sometimes forget why this is all happening and for what purpose. Your answer is as good as mine. This page records some of those thoughts. The future is empty and waiting to be filled in. The purpose of this page is to call forth a future that people may love among many others like bladerunner that we rather do without.


Robots of tomorrow

The geometric escalation of computing power forecasts human capacity for computation, memory and sensing, available on a chip for $1000 around 2025. Machines can be then expected to be highly intelligent with memories rivalling the library of congress, sesnors that gather terabits of data every second, and a brain that absorbs, understands, learns and acts. It is eeire to imagine that in a span of 3000 years of organized civilization humans are poised to transfer their intelligence to grains of sand.

The futures imagined here are sparked by this one insight from Hans Moravec.


A Psychological Perspective

Possibly, our children's children will grow up knowing not the difference between people and objects, relating to both with the same affection and relatedness. How civilization will evolve in this scenario remains to be seen. However, it is inevitable that we will be able to make machines with personalities and behaviors so close to ours that society will ask a question. The question is one of rights of the machine formerly created to slave to our needs and whims. Does an intelligent being, regardless of genesis have the rights we do, it may well be a consitutional crisis that the planet faces.

We then come to the questions that Asimov raises in his fiction. One solution is to outlaw human-like robots and use robotics to create smart machines that are precluded from common sense and innovation, lacking any aspect that reminds us of human nature; thus avoiding the problem. Such a society is enacted in Asimov's foundation books and Star Trek, where the few humaniform robots are accorded human civlity and rights. There are other, perhaps less palatable approaches like treating robots as objects to be ignored and even used to insulate people against people, creating a perfect utopia, sans relatedness and human contact.


Evolution of humans and Society

It may be ineffective to think of our future in the current context of economics, competition, wealth/power and achievement. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the automation revolution will rip out our current social and economic models. One can only imagine what they will be replaced by. At the onset of the industrial revolution, we could afford to look beyond feudalism and create a middle class, where the vast majority had access to freedom, education and comfort. What will the automation revolution bring?

We are still shackled in a pyramidal structure, where only a few create, a few others decide and the rest are cogs of the vast industrial complex. As Toefler puts it so well, all aspects of our life, our schools, workplaces, and families are designed/forced into a clockwork model to serve this machine; where the roles of the majority is to learn certain tasks well and repeat them incessantly, be it a janitor, check out counter clerk, factory worker, accountant, teacher, engineer, TV actor, or doctor.

Another model we live, is economics of scarcity. This is reflected in assertions of the necissity of unemployment, dumping millions of gallons of milk by third world and developed nations alike. Cultural manifestations include the omnipresent device of competition and the ethics of constant work.

The automation revolution will obsolete such paradigms. If machines provide for all our needs and comforts; If machines make any job as obselete as the job of the guy who lit street lamps, what will we do. Why would we need to do anything? What is the need for competition, be it among spouses, class mates or nations? Do we still need the economics of money?

In thinking about these issues, it may be important to distinguish between work that people wnat to do vs. that which people have to do. It is also useful to consider that notwithstanding the industrial age, people have always needed others to provide for material needs, and the automation revolution may create a scenario where we only need robots for our material needs. Can it be possible that the social structures of competition, including power, corporation and domination breakdown?

It is interesting to note the extent to which material scarcity may disappear. Robots will dissolve boundaries between Earth and Space, making the entire resources of a solar system accessible. Solar energy and the Moon alone can supply all energy and materials needs of a hundred billion without polluting our planet.

It has been said that once our basic needs of nourishment and curiosity are satisfied, we inquire into the purpose of life, leading to exploration, expressions of art and spirituality. Automation will cause for the first time mankind as a whole to take on that inquiry, where it becomes our foreground occupation. What are now our hobbies become pursuits. Rather than spirituality distributed by a few and consumed by many, it becomes an act of discovery where people grasp and discover their values, be it of family, honesty, generosity and contribution. Glimpses of such a future can be seen in the lifestyles of societies of Greece - using class based culture and ancient India - using minimalism.

Maybe, when we are free of doing, industrialism and competition, a new mankind will emerge. We will certainly draw upon the works of art and religion, maybe attempt to understand god and higher beings in ways beyond rational science, and most immediately inquire into the nature of our lives. The languages of music, art, poetry, drama, dance, and phlosophy might become predominant and current languages of mathematics, physics and biology may lose their hold. Practices of cooperation and inquiry through observation, exploration and distinguishing our being may hold sway over current norms of competition, measurements based on mathematical models, and artifact building.

How people relate to each other could also shift due these overt changes. We live in an age where we constantly compare, are compared in a constant classification and attribution of scales to our worth, abilities and talents. Notions of intelligence, wealth and power rule how we relate to each other. Sometimes we do consider notions that people have unlimited potential, everyone can do anything and even venture notions of a common energy/soul/chi. When the aforementioned notions and judgements become irrelevant and there is no juice left in such assertions, how will people relate to each other? The possibilities are infinite, and the futures they cause are frighteningly removed from our reality - the truth is that our future is more unconstrained than it has ever been; the choice of which can occupy generations.


lalit@ri.cmu.edu
Oct 1997