The Robot Challenge

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/05/index23article4.html

Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life? I would pay a lot for a robot that could put away the dishes or run simple errands. But I will not have the opportunity in this century, and probably not in the next one either. There are, of course, robots that weld or spray-paint on assembly lines and that roll through laboratory hallways; my question is about the machines that walk, talk, see, and think, often better than their human masters. Since 1920, when Karel Čapek coined the word robot in his play R.U.R., dramatists have freely conjured them up: Speedy, Cutie, and Dave in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Robbie in Forbidden Planet, the flailing canister in Lost in Space, the daleks in Dr. Who, Rosie the Maid in The Jetsons, Nomad in Star Trek, Hymie in Get Smart, the vacant butlers and bickering haberdashers in Sleeper, R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars, the Terminator in The Terminator, Lieutenant Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the wisecracking film critics in Mystery Science Theater 3000.

… [T]he gap between robots in imagination and in reality… shows the first step we must take in knowing Ourselves: appreciating the fantastically complex design behind feats of mental life we take for granted. The reason there are no humanlike robots is not that the very idea of a mechanical mind is misguided. It is that the engineering problems that we humans solve as we see and walk and plan and make it through the day are far more challenging than landing on the moon or sequencing the human genome. Nature, once again, has found ingenious solutions that human engineers cannot yet duplicate. When Hamlet says, “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!” we should direct our awe not at Shakespeare or Mozart or Einstein or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar but at a four-year old carrying out a request to put a toy on a shelf.

In a well-designed system, the components are black boxes that perform their functions as if by magic. That is no less true of the mind. The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle. In the Jewish legend of the Golem, a clay figure was animated when it was fed an inscription of the name of God. The archetype is echoed in many robot stories. The statue of Galatea was brought to life by Venus’ answer to Pygmalion’s prayers; Pinocchio was vivified by the Blue Fairy. Modern versions of the Golem archetype appear in some of the less fanciful stories of science. All of human psychology is said to be explained by a single, omnipotent cause: a large brain, culture, language, socialization, learning, complexity, self-organization, neural-network dynamics.

I want to convince you that our minds are not animated, by some godly vapor or single wonder principle. The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, is designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems each contrived to overcome its own obstacles. … I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening of the imagination comparable to learning that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies or that a drop of pond water teems with microscopic life.

What does it take to build a robot? Let’s put aside superhuman abilities like calculating planetary orbits and begin with the simple human ones: seeing, walking, grasping, thinking about objects and people, and planning how to act…

Robot design is a kind of consciousness-raising. We tend to be blasé about our mental lives. We open our eyes, familiar articles present themselves; we will our limbs to move, and objects and bodies float into place; we awaken from a dream, and return to a comfortingly predictable world… But think of what it takes for a hunk of matter to accomplish these improbable outcomes, and you begin to see through the illusion. Sight and action and common sense and violence and morality and love are no accident, no inextricable ingredients of an intelligent essence, no inevitability of information processing. Each is a tour de force, wrought by a high level of targeted design. Hidden behind the panels of consciousness must lie fantastically complex machinery—optical analyzers, motion guidance systems, simulations of the world, databases on people and things, goalschedulers, conflict-resolvers, and many others. Any explanation of how the mind works that alludes hopefully to some single master force or mind-bestowing elixir like “culture,” “learning,” or “self-organization” begins to sound hollow, just not up to the demands of the pitiless universe we negotiate so successfully.

The robot challenge hints at a mind loaded with original equipment, but it still may strike you as an argument from the armchair. Do we actually find signs of this intricacy when we look directly at the machinery of the mind and at the blueprints for assembling it? I believe we do, and what we see is as mind-expanding as the robot challenge itself.

— Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works