Essays. FSF Columns

by Bruce Sterling

  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. Spinoffs 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.

  “Watching the Clouds”

  In the simmering depths of a Texas summer, there are few things more soothing than sprawling on a hillside and watching the clouds roll by. Summer clouds are especially bright and impressive in Texas, for reasons we will soon come to understand— and anyhow, during a Texas summer, any activity more strenuous than lying down, staring at clouds, and chewing a grass-stem may well cause heat-stroke.

  By the early nineteenth century, the infant science of meteorology had freed itself from the ancient Aristotelian dogma of vapors, humors, and essences. It was known that the atmosphere was made up of several different gases. The behavior of gases in changing conditions of heat, pressure and density was fairly well understood. Lightning was known to be electricity, and while electricity itself remained enormously mysterious, it was under intense study. Basic weather instruments — the thermometer, barometer, rain gauge, and weathervane — were becoming ever more accurate, and were increasingly cheap and available.

  And, perhaps most importantly, a network of amateur natural philosophers were watching the clouds, and systematically using instruments to record the weather.

  Farmers and sailors owed their lives and livelihoods to their close study of the sky, but their understanding was folkloric, not basic. Their rules of thumb were codified in hundreds of folk weather-proverbs. “When clouds appear like rocks and towers/ the earth’s refreshed with frequent showers.” “Mackerel skies and mares’ tails/ make tall ships carry low sails.” This beats drowning at sea, but it can’t be called a scientific understanding.

  Things changed with the advent of Luke Howard, “the father of British meteorology.” Luke Howard was not a farmer or sailor — he was a Quaker chemist. Luke Howard was born in metropolitan London in 1772, and he seems to have spent most of his life indoors in the big city, conducting the everyday business of his chemist’s shop.

  Luke Howard wasn’t blessed with high birth or a formal education, but he was a man of lively and inquiring mind. While he respected folk weather-wisdom, he also regarded it, correctly, as “a confused mass of simple aphorisms.” He made it his life’s avocation to set that confusion straight.

  Luke Howard belonged to a scientific amateur’s club in London known as the Askesian Society. It was thanks to these amateur interests that Howard became acquainted with the Linnaean System. Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish botanist, had systematically ranked and classified the plants and animals, using the international language of scholarship, Latin. This highly useful act of classification and organization was known as “modification” in the scientific terminology of the time.

  Though millions of people had watched, admired, and feared clouds for tens of thousands of years, it was Luke Howard’s particular stroke of genius to recognize that clouds might also be classified.

  In 1803, the thirty-one-year-old Luke Howard presented a learned paper to his fellow Askesians, entitled “On the Modifications of Clouds, and On the Principles of Their Production, Suspension, and Destruction.”

  Howard’s speculative “principles” have not stood the test of time. Like many intellectuals of his period, Howard was utterly fascinated by “electrical fluid,” and considered many cloud shapes to be due to static electricity. Howard’s understanding of thermodynamics was similarly halting, since, like his contemporaries, he believed heat to be an elastic fluid called Caloric.

  However, Howard’s “modifications” — cirrus, cumulus, and stratus — have lasted very successfully to the present day and are part of the bedrock of modern meteorology. Howard’s scholarly reputation was made by his “modifications,” and he was eventually invited to join the prestigious Royal Society. Luke Howard became an author, lecturer, editor, and meteorological instrument-maker, and a learned correspondent with superstars of nineteenth-century scholarship such as Dalton and Goethe. Luke Howard became the world’s recognized master of clouds. In order to go on earning a living, though, the father of British meteorology wisely remained a chemist.

  Thanks to L
innaeus and his disciple Howard, cloud language abounds in elegant Latin constructions. The “genera” of clouds are cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus; altocumulus, altostratus, nimbostratus; stratocumulus, cumulus and cumulonimbus.

  Clouds can also be classified into “species,” by their peculiarities in shape and internal structure. A glance through the World Meteorological Organization’s official International Cloud Atlas reveals clouds called: fibratus, uncinus, spissatus, castellanus, floccus, stratiformus, nebulosus, lenticularis, fractus, humilis, mediocris, congestus, calvus, and capillatus.

  As if that weren’t enough, clouds can be further divvied-up into “varieties,” by their “special characteristics of arrangement and transparency”: intortus, vertebratus, undulatus, radiatus, lacunosis, duplicatus, translucidus, perlucidus and opacis.

  And, as a final scholastic fillip, there are the nine supplementary features and appended minor cloud forms: incus, mammatus, virga, praecipitatio, arcus, tuba,pileus, vella, and pannus.

  Luke Howard had quite a gift for precise language, and sternly defended his use of scholar’s Latin to other amateurs who would have preferred plain English. However elegant his terms, though, Howard’s primary insight was simple. He recognized that most clouds come in two basic types: “cumulus” and “stratus,” or heaps and layers.

  Heaps are commoner than layers. Heaps are created by local rising air, while layers tend to sprawl flatly across large areas.