In the 70’s, when I read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories, I never thought I’d live to see the day when robots would become an everyday reality. Then yesterday afternoon I found myself standing in my garden for nearly 15 minutes just watching our grass-cutting robot (that we’ve unremarkably called Robban) doing its work. This is our fourth summer with the robot and I’m as fascinated now as I was in the spring of 2016 when we bought it. The robot saves me an incredible 6 – 8 hours of work A WEEK at this time of year. I’ve no idea how many hours work that saves me over the whole summer, but for sure more than 100. Brilliant! Robban cuts about 75 % of our lawns and the rest I do with an ordinary motor-powered lawnmower, which I walk around with 2 or 3 hours a week. I get a bit of exercise too, in other words.
That sort of technology has been helping us for many years in industry, but only in later years close to us, in our homes. Asimov wrote perhaps 20 excellent short stories specifically about robots and I’ve read them all several times. Most of them were either in an industrial environment or in outer space, but a couple were even placed in a domestic situation: Robbie (1940) and Satisfaction Guaranteed (1951). Both stories are about a family member that develops an emotional attachment to a robot. “Robbie” is used as a child-minder which the child grows very attached to and in Satisfaction Guaranteed, “Tony” is used for general duties in the home and the wife falls in love. During the 1940’s Asimov formulated what he called “The three laws of robotics”, on which all the stories are based. They look like this:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
I’ve also been looking at other robot types on YouTube. Boston Dynamics are good at that and they’ve developed a bunch of humanoid robots, which are quite fantastic in a mobile way. They can do all sorts of manual work, walk, run, jump and lift things. But they lack what Asimov called the “positronic brain” and are limited in that way. We’re still a long way from Asimov’s 1940’s vision of the positronic robot.
Talking of I, Robot, the film of that name was bloody awful. I bought it on DVD when it came out and was very disappointed. Hollywood simply took the title and characters and wrote a standard sci-fi story, which had nothing to do with any of the smart stories Asimov wrote. I don’t remember Will Smith’s character in any of the original stories. If it was there, it only played a small part. The real hero of the books, robot-psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin (played by Bridget Moynahan) was transformed from a middle-aged, very intelligent scientist to a thirty-something helpless bimbo. Ridiculous. At the end of film, the credits state that the movie was “suggested by Isaac Asimov‘s book”. I think it would have been more honest to state “Isaac Asimov’s book was ignored”. I found it pathetic, though the film is probably OK if you haven’t read Asimov’s robot stories.
The Robots is a song by Kraftwerk from their album The Man Machine. I was always quite disturbed by the fact that Kraftwerk didn’t have many guitarists in the band (none), but I liked them anyway and even bought some of their records. The Man Machine is still a very listenable album and to prove it I enjoyed listening to the whole thing last night.