by Peter Nowak
New Jersey software engineer Douglas Hines has taken it one step further with his True Companion, a robot that can talk and think and is, er, anatomically functional. Hines thinks he’s put most of the pieces together, save for the ability to walk (like Aiko), and so he plans to start selling his creation in 2010 at a price comparable to the Real Doll. His robot, which he’s calling “Roxy,” will be more advanced than previous attempts because it can adopt different emotional states and personalities. “The sex side is easy, but nobody’s integrated these pools of technology,” Hines says. “Roxy takes the inputs she’s given and decides what emotional states they’re associated with. If there are enough inputs given to justify a transition to that state, then she transitions. So, for example, if she’s sleeping and hears that you’re waking up and trying to interact with her, she’ll make that transition if she has enough input over enough time to the sleepy state, and then continue on from there.”28
Whether the True Companion proves to be a hit or not, most people will still consider sex with robots to be the same as sex with dolls—either odd, creepy or pathetic. But sexual psychologists argue that this attitude is bound to change. Consider that only sixty years ago, homosexuality, pre-marital sex and masturbation were all generally considered wrong and immoral. Now, early into the new millennium, all three are more or less accepted. Even the staunchest conservative American states are allowing gay marriage, no one bats an eye when an unmarried couple moves in together, and vibrator sales are going through the roof. Even more recently, online dating was viewed with considerable disdain, as a refuge for the desperate or socially maladjusted, but no one speaks ill of it anymore because, well, everybody is doing it.
In his 2007 book Love + Sex with Robots, British artificial intelligence researcher David Levy argues that having sex with and even marrying robots will be commonplace by 2050, for both men and women. Others, including inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, believe it will be even earlier, perhaps by 2029. Levy says we will fall in love with our robots for the same reasons we fall in love with other humans, our pets or even inanimate objects like cars or computers. Like Star Trek’s Commander Data, they can be programmed to be just as intelligent, funny, romantic and caring as any human. Levy argues that robots will be even better sex partners than humans because they can be programmed with all the sexual information in the world. Imagine an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kama Sutra!
Robots could also provide “spice” to a relationship by learning their mate’s behaviour and varying their programming accordingly, perhaps by changing their voice, personality or even appearance. And they’ll be able to fulfill sexual fantasies in ways that real people cannot. As one example, many couples jokingly grant each other a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, a permission to cheat on their partner with the celebrity of their choice should the unlikely opportunity ever present itself. While a man in such an arrangement may never get to have sex with the real Angelina Jolie, he certainly could with a reasonable facsimile. That may seem far-fetched, but Abyss is already making Real Dolls designed in the likenesses of real porn stars working for adult company Wicked Pictures. Licensing one’s image to sex robot makers is a potentially huge source of revenue for celebrities and porn stars alike.
When sex robots do arrive and attitudes toward them change, one thing is definite: they will sell. If the historical market for prostitution and pornography is any indication, robots may very well end up being the best thing to happen to sex since the discovery of the orgasm. Some even suggest that the old fear about robots, that they will steal jobs from humans, will come true—in prostitution. “When sexual robots are available in large numbers, a cold wind is likely to blow through the profession, causing serious unemployment,” says Levy.
Somehow, I don’t see Toyota going anywhere near this.
Replacing Teenagers
Teenagers may also be on the endangered list, as least as far as employment is concerned. The boring, repetitive and unskilled jobs that are the hallmarks of many people’s adolescence are ripe picking for robots, too. R. Craig Coulter knows this, which is why he’s helping fast-food companies adopt robotic labour.
Coulter, a PhD graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s prestigious robotics program, knows exactly what his advanced university degree amounts to: $6.50 an hour. It could have been worse, though. That wage was actually twenty-five cents more than the typical employee got at McDonald’s, which is where he worked after completing his robotics degree. “I had dinner with the dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon a year after that happened, and I told him I had empirical evidence for what a PhD is actually worth,” he laughs.29
All kidding aside, Coulter didn’t work at McDonald’s because he couldn’t find a job after university. He was conducting research on HyperActive Bob, a robotic order-taking system that he hoped would transform the fast-food industry. The idea for Bob came to him after seeing one too many orders screwed up by staff at fast-food drive-thrus. Like many who have experienced this, Coulter couldn’t could help but think, “How hard can it be to get an order right?” The problem, he found while working his McJob, was that despite being one of the world’s biggest industries, the fast-food business still depends far too much on low-paid, low-skilled human labour. The employees, usually teenagers, are often uninterested in the repetitive and dreary work. While every other industry has actively investigated how to put robots into such jobs—which the military refers to as the “3Ds,” for dull, dirty and dangerous—the fast-food business has been uncharacteristically slow to look at new technology. “It’s the last $100-billion-a-year industry on the planet that hasn’t automated,” Coulter says.
With that in mind, Coulter founded HyperActive Technologies with his friend Kieran Fitzpatrick, a fellow Carnegie Mellon graduate. In 2001 the duo consulted with fast-food industry analysts and found that not much could be done to improve the efficiency of the actual restaurant kitchens. They also concluded, however, that visitors became customers as soon as they entered the restaurant’s property—in many cases, the parking lot—yet nobody engaged with them until they reached the counter to place their order. The space in between was valuable time that could be spent preparing food for the customer.
The first version of Bob tried to address this problem with a set of sensors on the restaurant’s roof that detected new vehicles as they entered the property. A software program then tried to anticipate what each vehicle’s occupants might order. A mini-van, for example, probably meant children were on board, so kids’ meals should be prepared. This sort of vehicle profiling proved too inaccurate, though, so Coulter and Fitzpatrick focused solely on visitor volumes instead. When fed with enough historical sales data, the new system could accurately predict what menu items would be needed within the next few minutes and beam the information to employees inside the restaurant via an interactive touch-screen. “Statistically, it would be very difficult with an individual coming into the restaurant to say, ‘That guy is going to want a cheeseburger,’” Coulter says. “But if you’ve got ten people coming into the restaurant, you know that two or three of them are going to want a cheeseburger and some of them are going to want chicken.”
HyperActive tested the system with McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and a few other fast-food giants before finding an anchor customer in Zaxby’s, a mid-sized American chicken chain, in 2005. Zaxby’s prided itself on serving customers only freshly cooked chicken, which often resulted in long wait times or wasted food. HyperActive’s system, which costs about $5,000 to set up, reduced wait times by giving staff a better approximation of how much food would be needed, and when. The chicken chain estimates that stores using Bob save about $5,000 a year in food waste, and they also see other, less-tangible benefits, such as fewer employees quitting. “The turnover is relatively high because people don’t like getting yelled at. When Bob goes in, the yelling goes away,” one restaurant owner said.30
The big chains haven’t adopted Bob beca
use HyperActive, as a small company, doesn’t yet have the ability to supply the systems in the volumes needed. With Zaxby’s, HyperActive has been able to roll out Bob on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis. McDonald’s, for its part, seems to resent the suggestion that it even needs a robot system. A manager for the chain’s Canadian operations told me his restaurants were opting instead for a staff-scheduling system based on sales statistics. “In a lot of cases, that’s generally too late for you to react to it, which is why we’re doing more on the proactive side of the measurement and the projections of what our sales are going to be.”31
The fast-food giant’s suppliers and other food processors are considerably less resistant to using robotics. Lopez Foods and Tyson Foods, two of McDonald’s suppliers of beef and chicken, respectively, each use robotics—one to package and stack burger patties, the other to refrigerate poultry without human intervention. The market for such industrial robots, which have long been almost the exclusive domain of carmakers, is growing quickly as manufacturers add in new capabilities. Iceland-based food-processing equipment maker Marel, for example, has perfected a robotic system that can wash, de-slime, de-head, skin and filet about twenty fish a minute, while Germany’s Carnitech has built a fully automated boat that can process and pack five hundred tonnes of shrimp a month. Industrial robot maker KUKA, also based in Germany, has helped a meat processor replace its manual butchery with a fully automated system that uses lasers to track carcass sizes and positions. Industrial food-processing robots made up only 3 percent of the total market in 2009, but the share is growing as processors slowly come to appreciate the military’s “3-D” mantra.32
Independent food companies are also starting to get into the robotic fast-food game. Toronto-based Maven’s Kosher Foods has designed a vending machine that can dispense freshly cooked hot dogs, while in Italy an entrepreneur has rolled out the strangely named “Let’s Pizza,” a similar contraption that creates custom-made pizzas in three minutes for five euros a pop. A glass window on the machine lets the buyer watch as the pizza dough is mixed and spun into shape, the sauce and toppings are added and the pizza is then cooked to taste. An American company, La Pizza Presto, has the same idea, but its machine cooks pre-made pies in just ninety seconds. When asked for their thoughts on the new inventions, Italian pizza cooks were predictably dismissive. “You can’t make any comparison, especially in terms of quality. The only benefit is the price,” one told Reuters.33
They couldn’t be more wrong. While chefs like to consider food creation an art inseparable from human touch, robots are actually perfectly suited to the task. They can’t come up with their own recipes—yet—but they can certainly replicate ones they are programmed with, and do so perfectly, every time. Humans, who are prone to distraction and errors, can’t make the same claim.
The big fast-food chains can’t afford to ignore robotic technology indefinitely because, as several have learned in recent years, the risks of continuing to rely on low-paid, low-motivated workers may prove too great. In 2008 Burger King was hit with a public relations fiasco when an employee took a bubble bath in one of the restaurant’s large sinks, then posted a video of it on his MySpace page. Similarly, Domino’s faced public outrage in 2009 after a video of employees putting snot into food hit YouTube. Both companies had to backpedal and assure customers that these were isolated incidents and that their food was indeed clean and safe. The damage to their reputations, however, was done.
As more of these incidents surface, and they inevitably will given the ubiquity of social media such as YouTube, the appeal of replacing low-paid labour with robots is only going to increase. That means teenagers and other unskilled labourers will be displaced and have to find a new kind of work. It may be a small price to pay to keep boogers off our pizzas.
10
OPERATION DESERT LAB
When you’re at war, you think about a better life. When you’re at peace, you
think about a more comfortable one.1
—NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT THORNTON WILDER,
FROM THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH
For much of modern history, the Middle East has been a fertile land of invention where science and technology flourished. From the seventh century onward, while Europe wallowed in the war, hunger and disease of the Dark Ages, the Middle East enjoyed a golden era, an enlightened renaissance from which a steady stream of life-improving inventions flowed. Water turbines, navigational astrolabes, glass mirrors, clocks, the fountain pen and even an analogue computer that calculated the date were just some of the innovations of the time. While Europeans were busying themselves burning libraries and fighting over who God favoured, Islamic scholars were laying the foundations for many of the world’s modern institutions by opening the first hospitals, pharmacies and universities. They also laid the groundwork for a number of modern sciences, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and medicine.
Things have changed dramatically in recent times. The past few decades of political turmoil, war and, in some places, religious fundamentalism have largely crippled the region’s intellectual institutions. An area that was once the envy of the world for its progressive thinking now lags in just about every intellectual and technological measure. In Iran, the former seat of the once-powerful Persian Empire, literacy rates are well below that of the Western world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the current centres of conflict, barely 40 percent of the population can read. Internet use is well behind the developed world, and where people are actually surfing the web, censorship is rampant. While the blocking of pornographic sites isn’t too surprising in Muslim countries, the definition of “questionable” content also extends to political and free-speech websites and tools. During Iran’s election turmoil in 2009, the popular messaging service Twitter was blocked to prevent details of uprisings from spreading. Spending on science and technology in the region stands at a woeful 17 percent of the global average, ranking not just behind the West, but also behind some of the poorest countries in Africa and Asia.2
Technological advances have occurred in the Middle East in recent years, but perversely, they’ve been deployed by Western militaries. Since the early nineties, the United States and its allies have used the area as a sort of a laboratory for a vast array of new technologies, testing out their capabilities to see what works, what doesn’t work and what can be improved. The impetus behind all new war technology, the military tells us, is to save lives, but as we’ve already seen, there’s also the important by-product of technological spinoff into the mainstream, which is a key driver of Western economies. The recent conflicts in the Middle East are perhaps the best example to date of this terrible duality of military technology: while new war tools and weapons inflict tremendous pain, suffering and hardship on one group of people, they also create prosperity, convenience and comfort for others.
Another Green Revolution
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 sparked a new wave of Western technological development. The ensuing liberation through Operation Desert Storm was of course motivated by oil interests, but it also provided an opportunity for the American military to field-test new technologies, some of which had been sitting on the shelf from as far back as the Vietnam War.
Smart bombs, or precision-guided munitions, were the natural opposite of dumb bombs which, when dropped from a plane, simply used gravity to find their target. Smart bombs were developed during the Vietnam War and used lasers to find their mark—the target was illuminated by a beam that the bomb homed in on. The new weapons promised two key advantages over their precursors: they could improve the efficiency of bombing missions by decreasing the number of munitions needed, thus saving on costs and maximizing damage, and they could lower so-called “collateral damage,” or the destruction of non-military targets and civilian deaths. American forces used such bombs in small numbers in Vietnam, as did the British military during the Falklands War of 1982, but they proved to be of limited use in poor weather. It wasn’t until the Gulf War t
hat they were improved and deployed on a large scale.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander of the coalition forces, set the tone of the war in January 1991 when he dazzled reporters with a videotape of a smart bomb zooming through the doors of an Iraqi bunker to blow up a multi-storey command centre. The early stages of the war were going exactly as expected, Schwarzkopf announced, thanks largely to the incredibly accurate bombs being used. “We probably have a more accurate picture of what’s going on ... than I have ever had before in the early hours of a battle,” said the veteran general, who began his military service way back in 1956.3 Like radar back in the Second World War, smart bombs were hailed by an impressed media as a “miracle weapon” that pounded the Iraqi military into a sorry state, making the ensuing ground war short and easy. Only 7 percent of the munitions dropped on Iraqi forces, however, were of the “smart” kind; the rest were the traditional variety.
Still, smart bombs had proven their worth and their usage has steadily increased in each subsequent conflict. Fully 90 percent of the bombs brought to Iraq by American forces for the second go-round in 2003 were “smart.”4 The laser guidance used in the weapons, meanwhile, has gone mainstream in recent years, primarily in cars, where it has been incorporated into collision-avoidance systems. Toyota, for one, introduced a laser cruise control system in its 2001 Lexus which, like many of the robot vehicles in the DARPA road races, used beams of light to track other cars ahead of it.
If the videos of smart bombs flying into Iraqi targets in stunning first-person view were not enough to impress the public, most of whom were watching it all unfold on CNN, then the images of night-time air attacks were. The scenes I remember best involved the volleys of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire arcing upward at unseen stealth bombers high above. First, an orchestral cascade of lights would fly into the sky, followed shortly thereafter by a brilliant, expanding explosion on the ground. It seemed to be clear evidence of which side was winning. Like many people watching, I was awed by the technology and not thinking of the lives lost. All of it, of course, was broadcast in its full green-tinged glory.