Humanity's High Hopes for Our Robotic Offspring

Why is nobody scared of robots anymore? It seems like only yesterday we could barely get the popcorn to our mouths, so atremble were our puny fingers at the sight, and the thought, of the Terminator. On the written page, Isaac Asimov was spending an outsize chunk of one of history’s more prolific careers wondering, and worrying, about the line between man and machine, both where and whether it could be drawn. The whole gosh-darn concept of “the uncanny,” supposedly under pinning much of human fear, was described—at the term’s coining in 1906 by psychologist Ernst Jentsch—as “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.” Robo-fear, he might just as accurately have titled it, if people had talked like that back then and if the relevant Japanese hair-metal band had traveled back through time to grant its permission.

But our robo-fear, all of a sudden, has gone away. Robots in movies these days are too busy finding true love and overcoming adversity to use the barrel organ of machine guns in their chests. Bearded thinkers in the snowy North east no longer pause for hours before animatronic window displays, conducting frantic inventories of their inner fauna for something that might pass for a spark of ineffable humanity. Even blue-collar types who once ranted and wept into their beer about the very real possibility of a robot stealing their assembly-line jobs have retargeted their panic onto the denizens of Bangalore and Guangzhou. It’s not that we’ve somehow become braver as a species. No, it’s only robots that we are no longer scared of. Which is mysterious when you think about it, given that all those old robo-nightmares are coming true before our eyes.

I suppose I shouldn’t overgeneralize. If you’re a jihadist hunkered on a Waziri crag—or if you’re planning to attend a wedding in the region—killer robots in the sky are a new and quite valid concern, and I bet you worry about them. Oh, and academics, including the ones that actually design and construct robots, are more worried about them than ever. “Scientists Fear a Revolt by Killer Robots” blared a headline in The Sunday Times of London, crystallizing the minutes of last year’s International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Pasadena.

But the rest of us, the people—we’re listening with a new equanimity to news reports of the EATR (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), which sustains itself indefinitely on the battlefield by the scavenging and consumption of “organic material,” particularly when Robert Finkelstein, the president of Robotic Technology, assures us the EATR is “mostly vegetarian.” We have robot vacuum cleaners living in our homes, right under our roofs, and never think to accuse them of sleeping with our wives. Most tellingly, we stare at the innovations of someone like robotics mastermind David Hanson, with his warm, witty, seemingly flesh-covered cyborgs, and no longer feel that 20th-century chill, that foreboding, that dizzying uncertainty as to whether what we are seeing belongs to us or to them, is a “you” or an “it.” (All the robots in the related gallery are products of Hanson’s robotics facility in Richardson, Texas—judge for yourself.)