Gigaom AI Minute – September 18

Transcript

The earliest robots we know of in stories were mechanical creatures animated by magic. By the time Frankenstein was published, science had mostly replaced magic. By the time the twentieth century rolled around, robots were completely creatures of science. The word itself was coined from a 1920 Czech play and was derived from a Slavic word for slavery. The robots in that play were manufactured using bio-mechanics, and they were designed to do whatever drudgery humans didn’t want to.

A human character predicted something in that play that sounds very much like the what techno optimists of today say, "In ten years, Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything, that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Every one will live only to perfect himself."

The robots souls were not crushed by this work because they were made without souls, or feelings, or passions of any kind. Eventually the humans stop doing any work and the robots do everything until the robots finally decide to take over and kill all the humans. Let’s hope this is a case where life does not imitate art.