“But …” Annie’s voice was drowned out as a helicopter appeared overheard, flying low enough for them to see the metal of its underbelly. Its wings beat the air like a manic wasp trapped in a jam jar. The sound was earsplitting. Annie carried on talking: George could see her lips move, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
“I can’t hear you!” he screamed back.
The helicopter hovered over the center of town, where by now the angry mob was corralled against the old houses on the high street. George looked up, and suddenly saw that the air was full of rectangular bits of paper—blue, brown, purple, and pink. But they didn’t seem to be coming from the helicopter. Instead, they were flying up from the ground, spiraling and spinning in the currents generated by the rotor blades.
George realized at once what the pieces of paper were.
“It’s money!” he yelled over at Annie as loudly as he could. “MONEY—EVERYWHERE. PEOPLE ARE HERE FOR THE …”
The pilot of the helicopter, realizing that it was only making the situation worse, suddenly flew off, leaving George still shouting at the top of his voice.
“MONEY!” he screamed into the silence.
“MONEY!” yelled a young man next to George, thinking he was starting a chant.
Other people joined in, until the whole crowd was yelling, “MONEY! MONEY!” while leaping up and trying to grab handfuls of the bills floating through the air. Fights were breaking out between those who had managed to catch some and those who hadn’t. A man grabbed George’s T-shirt. “Give me your money!” he said menacingly.
“I don’t have any!” said George, terrified, holding out his empty hands. The man let go immediately and moved on to threaten the next person, who fortunately wasn’t Annie.
“We need to get out of here,” George hissed into Annie’s ear.
She turned and nodded, her face pale with shock. “How?” she mouthed.
“Follow me!” said George. He started to weave in and out of the crowd. It wasn’t easy, but they managed to navigate their way out of the crush without anyone trying to stop them.
• • •
Back at Annie’s house, they raided the fridge, making sure they stuck to the side with the food and drink rather than the part that housed Eric’s and Annie’s experiments.
“Oof!” Annie sloshed cold juice down her throat as George bit into a huge piece of oat bar. She was still trembling after their astonishing trip into town.
“Yum—this is delicious!” George had recovered more quickly; in any case, he was always hungry. “Did you make it?”
“No,” said Annie.
“Probably why it’s so nice,” said George. Annie flicked a tea towel at him.
“That was crazy!” she said after a pause. “And we didn’t even see UnDetection!”
“I don’t think they were there,” George replied. “I think those people went to the center of town because they heard about the money.”
“Yikes!” said Annie, checking Twitter on her phone. “You’re so right! It says that some bank machines in Foxbridge went crazy and starting spewing out money… . Why would they do that?”
“Weird,” said George, munching away. “Perhaps it was some kind of computer error? Instead of taking money into the bank, it got reversed and sent the money back out again.”
“We should have got some money, you know,” said Annie regretfully. Now that she had calmed down a little, she was able to review the situation objectively. “I could have bought some tickets for UnDetection’s stadium gig.”
But before George could reply, the doorbell rang. Annie started off toward the front door.
“Are you allowed to open the door when your parents aren’t home?” George asked, following her.
“I’ll just find out who’s there,” she told him before shouting through the letter box, “Who is it?”
“Delivery!” sang a cheerful voice. “For Professor Bellis! From The Future Is Now Foundation.”
“Sooooo exciting!” Annie whisked open the front door. “I’ll sign for it!’
She scribbled her name on the clipboard, obviously expecting to be handed a small package. But to their surprise, the delivery man went back to a bright red van emblazoned with the words THE FUTURE IS HERE!, opened the double back doors, and brought out a narrow rectangular box that was the height of a grown man. He managed to heave it through the front door and laid it down in the hallway. Saluting Annie and smiling, he returned to his van and set off without so much as a puff of exhaust smoke.
Annie closed the front door, and she and George stared in puzzlement at the long package.
“I thought it would just be some equipment for the home lab.” Annie looked baffled. “I don’t know what this could be. Should we open it?”
“I don’t know,” said George, undecided. “What do you think?”
“Ummm …” Annie was just making up her mind when the box seemed to make the decision for them. As they watched, it began to shake.
“It’s moving!” Annie cried.
The box seemed to be trying to right itself from the prone position it had been left in.
George stood there with his mouth open. “I heard a noise from inside … ,” he said slowly.
Sure enough, once again, from inside the box—which, now that George thought about it, was indeed the height and width of a person—came a knocking sound.
“Let me out!” came a faint voice.
“ARRGH!” screamed Annie. “There’s someone in the box!”
“No!” said George in disbelief. “You don’t send people by mail! There just can’t be anyone in that box.”
“Yes there is!” Annie ducked behind him.
There was the sound of ripping parcel tape, and then the cardboard flaps of the tall box swung open.
As the two friends watched in horror, first one long leg and then another stepped out of the box. Annie had squeezed her eyes tight shut, but George watched in terrified fascination as a figure emerged from the cardboard packaging. It was dressed in a tweed suit and sported a thatch of dark brown hair and a pair of very thick glasses. Its head was hanging down so George couldn’t really see its features. But even so, he realized he could take a guess at whose face it might resemble… .
“Annie,” he said. “I think you’d better take a look.”
“Is it a vampire?” she whispered into his ear, her eyes still closed.
“Weirder than that,” replied George.
“Weirder than a vampire? How weirder than a vampire?”
“Er, your dad … ? He is definitely weirder than a vampire. When he comes out of a box sent through the mail, that is.”
“My dad?” said Annie. “In a box?”
“As a robot,” added George.
“My dad in a box as a robot?” Even Annie’s super-high IQ seemed to be struggling now.
The figure lifted its head, and as it did so, it seemed to come to life. As George had predicted, it had Eric’s face, though newer and shinier than the real Eric, who was starting to look a bit worn out. It also had bright red eyes, where the real Eric had blue ones. But like the human it was modeled on, the new robot Eric had such thick glasses that its eyes were magnified; they looked enormous behind the powerful spectacles.
“Ew!” Annie had opened her eyes by now. “What is it?”
The android decided to answer for itself.
“ATVQ one zero XXX,” it burst out at top volume. “Vertical line! Vertical line!”
George had never come face-to-face with a lifelike robot before—in fact, he didn’t think he’d ever actually met an android before; not one that had been modified to look like a human being. He couldn’t stop staring at it—it was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen.
“What’s it saying?” whispered Annie.
“I dunno,” said George. “It’s your robot-dad, not mine. Watch out! It’s coming toward us.”
The robot started taking jerky steps toward the kids, talking to itself as i
t went.
“Random excitations of poetry before M theory develops time,” it declared.
The two friends backed away from the Eric-doppelgänger android, but it kept on coming toward them.
“Intrigued variety cells expressed flare telescope cosmic misfortune,” it rambled on, advancing as George and Annie reversed down the hallway.
“I think it’s swallowed a science dictionary,” muttered Annie.
“Sungrazers flirt magnitude astatine predictions.”
“Perhaps it’s got your dad’s vocabulary,” suggested George, “but doesn’t know how to use it?” Riveting though the new arrival was, he suddenly realized that they had no idea how to control it. The robot could, in theory, do anything at this point.
“What are we going to do?” hissed Annie. “Any minute now, we’re going to get trapped in a corner by a fake-Dad robot!”
But as they moved away from the android into the playroom, they also approached the TV, where George, without realizing it, trod on the games console: the TV came on—along with the last game he and Annie had played, a dance-off that Annie had won by thousands and thousands of points. Suddenly a blast of a party rock anthem burst out across the room. The robot’s eyes flashed, and while Annie and George watched in amazement, it started to dance along with the figures on the TV.
“It must somehow have automatically linked up to the Xbox!” Annie realized.
“Wow!” said George. “So if you ever wondered what your dad looked like dancing, now you know!”
“Don’t! I can’t bear to look!” Annie cringed, but at least this time it was out of embarrassment and not fear.
But disaster was only seconds away. When the song came to an end, the robot looked around for a distraction. Its red eyes fell on Annie’s old teddy bear, cozily ensconced in an armchair. For some reason, known only to its own circuits, it snatched up the bear and, as the next song started, began to dance with it. But the robot’s dancing was increasingly out of control, and instead of dancing with the bear, it appeared to be trying to rip the poor patched-up old thing apart.
Annie quickly saw the danger to her favorite childhood toy. She might be too old for cuddly bears now, but that didn’t mean she was going to stand by and see it destroyed by an android impostor.
“That’s my bear!” She threw herself at the robot and knocked it flying; it landed on an armchair, with Annie bashing it to make it let go of her teddy.
George ran over and was just starting to pull Annie off the android when he heard a familiar voice behind them.
“What is going on in here?”
MY ROBOT, YOUR ROBOTS
Writing about robots is as much fun as building robots. When I was younger, I used to draw robots, write about robots, and even build robots out of cardboard boxes and string. Now I build them for real—but I haven’t forgotten that it is a lot of fun.
Writers, scientists, and engineers use their imagination all the time to come up with new ways of doing things, and when it comes to robots, there is no end to the possibilities; well, almost. In fact, when you have to build a robot for real, you start to run into all sorts of problems, but they are always interesting problems, problems worth solving. In this essay I’m going to tell you some of the history of robots, some of the ways they are used today, and some of the ways we might be able to use them in the future.
The dream of building a machine that looks like something real goes way back in history. One of the first built was a mechanical servant created in ancient Greece around 250 BCE; this clever device could automatically pour a cup of wine from a jug, and mix it with water as required! Its inventor, Philo of Byzantium—also known as Philo Mechanicus—came up with lots of amazing mechanical ideas, including a water-powered chirping bird, but his servant automaton was one of his most popular. “Automaton” (plural: automata) is the name for a mechanical device which may look like a living thing.
In the eighteenth century, automata became amazingly popular. Inventors would use the new clockwork technology of the time to create beautiful devices that looked like living dolls—dolls that could play musical instruments, perform magic tricks, and even draw pictures and write. They would tour these around the courts of Europe and make lots of money from these exhibitions; the age of the clockwork robot had arrived. In their day, they wowed the crowds, but today they look kind of creepy, alive but not quite alive, with dolls’ faces, a key to wind them up, and tiny mechanical bodies that jump, shudder, and creak.
But they set the scene for the future: the “Draughtsman-Writer” automata designed by the Swiss clock-builder Henri Maillardet. These were able to draw pictures and write poems, and were what robot builders today would call programmable, as depending on the card you placed in the automaton’s slot, the machine would draw different things. In essence, most robots today are similar: they have a body, they have some way of deciding how to move, a list of things to do, and a way to provide the power to do them.
However, not all robots that inhabit the world with you today look like humans, as robots can take on all types of shapes and forms depending on what their job is. In modern car factories robots pick up parts and weld them together; and even computers themselves are now often built by industrial robots that put the different parts accurately in place. Robots like this can do these jobs without getting tired or bored, they are powered by electricity rather than clockwork, they have simple repetitive tasks to do but they get on with the job and do nothing else. They don’t really need to understand their world.
On a farm, however, there can be robots that milk cows, and these robots need to be much smarter, since cows won’t always be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. These farm robots have to be able to see and make decisions. When a cow wanders in, the robot has to identify where the udders are and carefully attach the suction cups to them to gently remove the milk. Therefore they need to have the ability to understand a picture from a camera, and work out the best way to move their suction-cupped arms safely and gently into place. If they get it wrong, there will be trouble!
These apparently simple tasks of seeing and moving are actually really hard for machines. About half your brain (including the bit at the back of your head called the visual cortex) is right now working on understanding the world you see around you, and a great big slice in the middle of your brain—called the motor cortex—is working out how to move your muscles to do what you want your body to do. Human brains are actually making billions and billions of calculations all the time, but what’s simple to us needs to be turned into clear instructions—thousands of lines of computer code—for a robot, and as we don’t yet understand exactly how the human brain does all these wonderful calculations, making a machine mimic it is tough. Fortunately, down on the farm, our limited understanding is enough for us to build robots with just enough intelligence to manage the job and keep the cows happy.
Ideas for robots can come from anywhere. There are scientists who study insect intelligence, for instance, since insect brains are much less complex than human brains with fewer interconnected networks of nerve cells—neurons—but insects are still smart. They have to be to survive in a difficult world—try swatting a fly! Using this example, in fact, there are robotic devices being built to fit into cars that allow cars to automatically swerve to avoid collisions; the idea for these devices came from studying flies’ brains.
But what if there was an accident? Who, then, would be responsible? The car driver, the car manufacturer, or perhaps even the fly? What do you think? As intelligent robots start to live in the world with us, there could be lots of questions like this.
Accepting robots into our world is complicated, and how we feel about them also may depend on where in the world you live. In the West, people tend to think of robots as sinister, out to take over the world; often this is because that’s the way robots are portrayed in films and on TV. In the Far East however, robots are often presented in stories as heroic characters.
&n
bsp; There is also something scientists call “the uncanny valley.” If you look at how acceptable robots are, we find that robots that look like robots are generally more acceptable than robots that look like humans … but aren’t quite the same. It’s that creepy living-doll problem from the age of automata again: things just don’t look right, so we don’t feel happy around them.
Today’s electronics and computer technologies, able to mimic the way the neurons in our brains work, as well as the movement of our limbs, allow us to build ever more lifelike robots, but they are still far from perfect. These androids—humanlike robots—now buzz as the electric motors whir, rather than creak with clockwork gears, and they have complex computer programs that try to artificially create the myriad ways our brain’s neurons work together, but the androids can’t yet effortlessly walk up stairs, catch a ball, or reliably tell the difference between silk and sandpaper. They can’t unfailingly recognize faces or expressions, or single out particular voices in noisy rooms like we can; they can’t yet talk, react, or understand us and our world as we would naturally expect a fellow human to. They are “not quite right,” so are hard for us to accept.
But all is not lost for today’s robots; our brains hold another trick we can use. In a classic experiment done by Heider and Simmel in the 1940s, people were shown random shapes moving around a screen, but when asked what was happening, many came up with elaborate stories about squares falling in love with circles or larger triangles chasing smaller triangles. Our brains are smart, gigantic learning machines, and one of the main ways we learn is by creating stories to make us better able to remember and understand our world. When we see robots, our brains tend to fill in the gaps that today’s technologies can’t yet build, so we naturally think that robots have personalities and are more intelligent than they really are, and robot-builders often give us cues to help us make these stories seem more real and that help us to accept and use the robots better.
One big problem with robots, for instance, is the question of what powers them. When the batteries go flat, they stop, and a robot can’t always be connected to electricity by a cable. To get around this problem, providing power to the robot can be made part of its story. A great example is how scientists created a baby seal robot to provide comfort to residents in an old people’s home and built in the need for the seal to be “fed”; they inserted a dummy teat that was actually a recharger for its batteries, so that recharging became a part of the robot’s story.
George and the Unbreakable Code Page 4