Given
the fact that robots are taking over so many of our human work activities, I
was trying the other day to gain some perspective on some of the reasons that
we have decided to use them. First of
all, there are the work activities that humans normally can do perfectly
well. This includes those activities for
which employers find it cost effective to use robots instead of humans. On the most basic level, robots are used in
warehouses to move boxes around and to find merchandise. Robots are also now being developed to do
caretaking for both children and seniors, an activity that modern professionals
increasingly find interferes with their satisfying lucrative careers. And plainly, for some very mentally active
people, the activity of caretaking seems to be boring. Robots are also being developed to replace
people in the truly dirty work of construction.
Many modern people are getting lazy and prefer to work in offices. Finding qualified construction workers is
getting more difficult.
On
the other extreme, there are those activities that are too dangerous for
humans. Robots were used in Fukushima,
Japan, to find and photograph the radioactive fuel that had gone missing as a
result of the earthquake and tsunami that had destroyed the nuclear plant there. Another robot is being developed by Stanford
University to go deep-sea diving for sunken treasure in places that are too
dangerous for human divers.
Then
there are those robotic activities that add a unique dimension to things that
humans already do. In other words, the
robots work alongside of humans in these situations. A good example is a robot cockroach. Being made of soft polymers, these robot
cockroaches would be able to squeeze through very narrow pathways and spaces
like real cockroaches and could be used to help human rescuers to find
survivors in buildings that collapsed as a result of natural disasters like
earthquakes. These robot cockroaches
could be let loose in swarms in the rubble of buildings to find survivors that
humans are having difficulty finding.
Once found, then humans could dig them up. The robot cockroaches could
bring an added dimension to the search-and-rescue being carried out by humans.
Although
there is little doubt that these robot cockroaches could be very beneficial in
helping rescuers find survivors, it is precisely in situations like these of
human-robot partnership that I feel my greatest concern in terms of preserving
the human sense of self. Actually, there
are other search and rescue robots of many different shapes and sizes including
a humanoid robot and even one shaped like a snake. The reason I focus on the robot cockroach is
that it seems so counterintuitive that a robot cockroach could somehow
indirectly influence human behavior. One
might ask, how can a human psychologically feel a merger with a robot that
resembles a cockroach. But the point is
that simply interacting with robots of any kind on a regular basis leads to
ongoing mirroring and modeling on the part of humans. Even when constructed of soft pliable
material like polymers, robots are complex behavioral entities that are made to
be impermeable. When one is constantly
juxtaposed next to impermeable complex behavioral entities – entities that
present a strong detached figure definition – some of that sense of
impermeability begins to rub off.
As
more and more impermeable robots begin to displace natural organisms as the
dominant complex behavioral entities in our fields of experience, we become
increasingly more robotic as a result of the constant contact. Robots become sources of both mirroring and
modeling, not necessarily through direct constant conscious imitation, but just
by creating modalities of behavior that are ever present at the edges of our
fields of experience. As we use robot cockroaches
to help us in search and rescue missions, we would probably not want to
consciously model ourselves after a machine that is a copy of a very lowly
organism. But unconsciously, if we are
around them enough, they will influence our behavior with their behavior. In particular, the cockroach robot, like all
robots, engages in defined discrete movements rather than the more flowing
blendable continual movements of an organic cockroach. And as one of many different kinds of robots
that increasing will surround us in our daily lives, it will contribute to our
gradual shift to the more defined discrete movements of a robot. Particularly, because cockroach robots don’t
totally replace humans and don’t perform a task that will preclude humans
engaging in other strategies for search and rescue missions.
And
yet perhaps, on one level, cockroach robots become like the equivalent of tamed
trained real-life cockroaches. After
working on search and rescue for a while, maybe cockroach robots will return to
circuses, where they can be programmed to perform tricks for their human
patrons. And humans will be enthralled
with their abilities, even though, when all is said and done, they are only
programmed machines. And this enthrallment
will occur because not only will humans become more robotic themselves from all
of this interaction, but they will increasingly begin to ascribe more organic
qualities to these robots and even very primitive senses of self, the way some
people do with the fleas in flea circuses.
The
problem is that people can’t simply use complex behavioral entities like robots
as if they were simple implements.
Supposedly with simple implements, we are totally in control, because
they can’t move or go into action without the agency of humans. Granted that in traditional societies, a
particular implement would be so associated with a particular member of the
society that a nickname could be ascribed to the person like “the hammer”. But basically simple implements help us, as
humans, to make and preserve our organic imprints.
But
robots are not extensions of humans the way that simple implements can be. Once created, robots leave their own
customized markings on the world. They
do not help us to make organic imprints, but rather they draw us into
increasingly standardized procedures for everything, and we use robots to
mediate for us in many different activities.
The more the actions or processes involve intense interactions between
humans and robots, the more the robots begin to influence the humans and to
affect their capacity to live life with meaning.
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