The Good Robot

The good robot will have three functionalities. One is a sensory system that conveys what is happening outside it fully and accurately. The second is a logical structure within able to “understand” outer events correctly. The third is a motor system, moved by the logical structure, which will enable it to act correctly, thus avoiding “dangers” and realizing “values.”

Are we good robots? It seems that we are. Our sensory systems bring us the outside world without distortion, more or less “straight.” To be sure, we have some problems at dawn or dusk or in the night—and fire hydrants may look like dogs if, say, some discarded cardboard box is leaning up against it. We are fast. And because we are, it is very difficult to draw sharp lines between our perceptions and our reactions. But at least at the level of ordinary experience what comes in is neutral. What we perceive may be interpreted as threatening or attractive, but those qualities arise from within. They follow the perception at a tiny lag in time. In turn our actions or inactions to this stimulus are sequentially last.

Imagine next what would happen if the input were distorted. This can happen if the sensory apparatus is defective or comes to be modified by drugs. Suppose that our senses were managed by another person—and that that person had something to gain or lose by how we interpreted the incoming signal. The reason why our inputs are always just “the facts, Mam, nothing but the facts” is because we are—a good robot. The design is optimal. It mutes the same old and draws attention, always, to change, the unusual—the moving, the too hot, too cold, too sharp, too dim, too bright. Otherwise it is neutral.

Now our modern Media are our only organ for sensing the Great Collective. Alas, they’re managed by other people. And these people have incentives to distort the signal in ways that will benefit them. Minimally they have to earn income to support the services they provide, and they are in competition—whereas, in us, different senses, like touch, sight, smell, hearing, taste are flawlessly organized so that only the intensity of a sensation will cause us to prefer one over another sense. “What is that evil smell. Where does it come from?!” And we’re on our feet—even if we’re watching a very tense mystery.

To be a great collective robot’s sensory system, the Media must deliver news, if nothing else, as objectively as possible. But that’s only possible if there is a unity of vision out there too. Reforming the Media, so that they deliver only the facts, Mam, without slant, clever choice, and interpretation appears, ultimately, an impossibility. We’re individuals, not cells in a Great Collective. Therefore, in the case of watching or reading the Media, what comes in is a distortion—and yet another functionality must be cultivated before we can permit ourselves to react. We must develop and apply a truth filter. No robot has that, alas, be it good or bad. But we do.

On Rising Curves

An early lesson I learned in my pursuit of practical economics—indeed I turned it into a personal slogan—is that no curve ever rises forever. It came in handy in the 1960s. Virtually every industrial curve was visibly rising, irresistibly, it seemed. Those of us hired to advise industry on the future were tempted to point at all those uptrending lines as the easy way out. Our clients were already on board with that. But one can’t take the low road, not responsibly. So I had my dispiriting slogan. Industry journals didn’t help. They made the most of those trends; boundless optimism was not only normal, it was politically correct. Just recalling the atmosphere then now reminds me how everything looked in those innocent days.

It was a period of continuous and rapid…Integration. The Industrial Age had, as it were, come of age. All that remained was to put all of the many pieces together. Technology, in those days, did not mean what it means today—the spread of cybernetics into ever smaller devices of communication. The word then meant the application of new materials across the vast universe of all kinds of products—industrial machinery as well as consumer goods. This included, at the industrial level, changes to machinery to process materials better and faster. One of the hottest trade magazines, those days, believe it or not, was Steel, and almost monthly innovations in forming, shaping, cutting, or preserving steel filled the magazine’s breathless pages. That too came to pass. Steel tried to keep itself alive by opening its pages more widely to technology (in the old sense of the word) but couldn’t quite manage the job. The atmosphere had changed. No sooner had the economy integrated all of these arts, mechanics, and materials than industry (old meaning) lost the public eye; its struts, wires, tendons, and muscles disappeared (as they do in organic bodies) under skin—and in their case beneath shiny outer bodies, the fuselage, and the reflecting surface of new architecture.

The next big visible issue turned out to be the very negatives of the now submerged Age of the Machine. Once it vanished, its wastes became visible. For some decades, beginning in the 1970s, Environment became the issue and eventually turned all of us into either would-be-green recyclers or dug-in clear-cutters and adamant regulation-haters. And then dawned the Age of the Computer with the Apple. The child of cybernetics—am I surprised that my spark plug fires at the wink of a built-in chip? not in the least; I’m inclined to yawn—the child of the chip is the Social Network, perhaps the last and final stage of…Integration. It’s still rising. Oh the excitement, the new Political Correctness (“Follow us on Facebook, Twitter”). Rising. Going public. Making the billions mushroom from nothing. But no curve rises for ever.

Is the next big age the Age of Disintegration? Have we just seen the birth of it in that almost-successful attempt to set a limit—somewhat lower than the sky—to debt? To be followed more effectively by new innovations coming tomorrow. Is this age beginning at the top but promising to come down all the way to us, bringing its desirable products and services to our own humble little homes in a decade or two? We shall see. But if it comes, the dis, we must remember that all rising curves eventually dip—and then in turn produce yet other new exciting things to write home about—if the Post Office is still up and running.