As a social group in Western society, scientists have successfully
identified themselves with the practice of rational and objective
inquiry, but this situation need not go on indefinitely. How would
scientists themselves react if their admiration for reason came into
direct conflict with their human institutions, human community, and
human interests?
One wonders how scientists would react if truly rational, truly
objective, truly nonhuman Artificial Intelligences were winning all
the tenure, all the federal grants, and all the Nobels. Suppose that
scientists suddenly found themselves robbed of cultural authority,
their halting efforts to understand made the object of public ridicule
in comparison to the sublime efforts of a new power group --
superbly rational computers. Would the qualities of objectivity and
rationality still receive such acclaim from scientists? Perhaps we
would suddenly hear a great deal from scientists about the
transcendant values of intuition, inspiration, spiritual understanding
and deep human compassion. We might see scientists organizing to
assure that the Pursuit of Truth should slow down enough for them
to keep up. We might perhaps see scientists struggling with mixed
success to keep Artificial Intelligence out of the schoolrooms. We
might see scientists stricken with fear that their own children were
becoming strangers to them, losing all morality and humanity as they
transferred their tender young brains into cool new racks of silicon
ultra-rationality -- all in the name of progress.
But this isn't science. This is only bizarre speculation.
For Further Reading:
THE CREATIONISTS by Ronald L. Numbers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
Sympathetic but unsparing history of Creationism as movement and
doctrine.
THE GENESIS FLOOD: The Biblical Record and its Scientific
Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961). Best-known and most
often-cited Creationist text.
MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS: Practical and Useful Evidences of
Christianity by Henry M. Morris (CLP Publishers, 1974). Dr Morris
goes beyond flood geology to offer evidence for Christ's virgin birth,
the physical transmutation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, etc.
CATALOG of the Institute for Creation Research (P O Box 2667, El
Cajon, CA 92021). Free catalog listing dozens of Creationist
publications.
CULT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATIONISM: Understanding
Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past edited by Francis B. Harrold
and Raymond A. Eve (University of Iowa Press, 1987). Indignant
social scientists tie into highly nonconventional beliefs about the
past.
"Robotica '93"
We are now seven years away from the twenty-first century. Where are all our robots?
A faithful reader of SF from the 1940s and '50s might be surprised to learn that we're not hip-deep in robots by now. By this time, robots ought to be making our breakfasts, fetching our newspapers, and driving our atomic-powered personal helicopters. But this has not come to pass, and the reason is simple.
We don't have any robot brains.
The challenge of independent movement and real-time perception in a natural environment has simply proved too daunting for robot technology. We can build pieces of robots in plenty. We have thousands of robot arms in 1993. We have workable robot wheels and even a few workable robot legs. We have workable sensors for robots and plenty of popular, industrial, academic and military interest in robotics. But a workable robot brain remains beyond us.
For decades, the core of artificial-intelligence research has involved programming machines to build elaborate symbolic representations of the world. Those symbols are then manipulated, in the hope that this will lead to a mechanical comprehension of reality that can match the performance of organic brains.
Success here has been very limited. In the glorious early days of AI research, it seemed likely that if a machine could be taught to play chess at grandmaster level, then a "simple" task like making breakfast would be a snap. Alas, we now know that advanced reasoning skills have very little to do with everyday achievements such as walking, seeing, touching and listening. If humans had to "reason out" the process of getting up and walking out the front door through subroutines and logical deduction, then we'd never budge from the couch. These are things we humans do "automatically," but that doesn't make them easy -- they only seem easy to us because we're organic. For a robot, "advanced" achievements of the human brain, such as logic and mathematical skill, are relatively easy to mimic. But skills that even a mouse can manage brilliantly are daunting in the extreme for machines.
In 1993, we have thousands of machines that we commonly call "robots." We have robot manufacturing companies and national and international robot trade associations. But in all honesty, those robots of 1993 scarcely deserve the name. The term "robot" was invented in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, for a stage drama. The word "robot" came from the Czech term for "drudge" or "serf." Capek's imaginary robots were made of manufactured artificial flesh, not metal, and were very humanlike, so much so that they could actually have sex and reproduce (after exterminating the humans that created them). Capek's "robots" would probably be called "androids" today, but they established the general concept for robots: a humanoid machine.
If you look up the term "robot" in a modern dictionary, you'll find that "robots" are supposed to be machines that resemble human beings and do mechanical, routine tasks in response to commands.
Robots of this classic sort are vanishingly scarce in 1993. We simply don't have any proper brains for them, and they can scarcely venture far off the drawing board without falling all over themselves. We do, however, have enormous numbers of mechanical robot arms in daily use today. The robot industry in 1993 is mostly in the business of retailing robot arms.
There's a rather narrow range in modern industry for robot arms. The commercial niche for robotics is menaced by cheap human manual labor on one side and by so-called "hard automation" on the other. This niche may be narrow, but it's nevertheless very real; in the US alone, it's worth about 500 million dollars a year. Over the past thirty years, a lot of useful technological lessons have been learned in the iron-arms industry.
Japan today possesses over sixty percent of the entire world population in robots. Japanese industry won this success by successfully ignoring much of the glamorized rhetoric of classic robots and concentrating on actual workaday industrial uses for a brainless robot arm. European and American manufacturers, by contrast, built overly complex, multi-purpose, sophisticated arms with advanced controllers and reams of high-level programming code. As a result, their reliability was poor, and in the grueling environment of the assembly line, they frequently broke down. Japanese robots were less like the SF concept of robots, and therefore flourished rather better in the real world. The simpler Japanese robots were highly reliable, low in cost, and quick to repay their investment.
Although Americans own many of the basic patents in robotics, today there are no major American robot manufacturers. American robotics concentrates on narrow, ultra-high-tech, specialized applications and, of course, military applications. The robot population in the United States in 1992 was about 40,000, most of them in automobile manufacturing. Japan by contrast has a whopping 275,000 robots (more or less, depending on the definition). Every First World economy has at least some machines they can proudly call robots; Germany about 30,000, Italy 9,000 or so, France around 13,000, Britain 8,000 and so forth. Surprisingly, there are large numbers in Poland and China.