What happened to the robots?

Karel Čapek, a Czech, invented the concept of robots in his 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots.  His robots were used in factories as labourers and eventually overthrew and destroyed humanity.

Throughout the 1950s and '60s Isaac Asimov wrote feverishly on the topic of robots and inspired a generation of writers.  In the 1980s C3PO and R2D2 fought alongside humans in Star Wars and humans fretted about the three laws of robotics that would keep us safe from the metallic monsters in our midst.

It never happened.  Humanoid robots are still, safely, stuck in novels and films.  The world of robots never materialised.  How come?

Isaac Asimov was no economist and many of the limitations of science fiction are derived directly from the assumptions of scarcity.  Back in the 1950s computers were fiendishly expensive devices.  The UNIVAC I, designed for business use, cost between US$1,250,000 and US$1,500,000 in 1951.  Only 46 were ever sold but they were in use until the 1960s.

It made sense to assume, as he did, that you’d want to get the most out of such an expensive tool and so gear it to be as multifunctional as possible.

Then came along a nation of innovative mimics who copied everything the West had invented but dramatically reduced the cost and time of production.  No, not the Chinese, the Japanese.  Prices plunged and, after studying the astonishing rise in processing power, Gordon Moore – one of the founders of Intel – made his famous prediction in 1965 that the number of transistors in microprocessors would double every two years.

Suddenly engineers were putting processors into everything.

Asimov had assumed that devices would continue to be used by humans but assisted by robots.  Everything would continue to be a dumb device; from motor cars to space ships to washing up dishes – nothing would be automated.  He, along with other futurists, failed to recognise how rapidly their predictions were being overwhelmed.

In 1961 UNIMATE – the first industrial robot – was at work in General Motors’ production plant.  By the late 1970s Victor Scheinman’s Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm (Puma) was widely used in manufacturing.  They look nothing like humans.  Production plants aren’t safe places for humans to wonder about.  Some are entirely sealed.

The Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner is about the size of a frizbee and only slightly higher than a thick book.  Manufactured by iRobot, it is an artificially intelligent device that does exactly one thing: it vacuums your house.  It empties and recharges itself at its base station.

In Asimov’s world you would have had a normal vacuum cleaner and a robot would have pushed it around the house, prior to dipping its hands into a sink and manually washing your dishes.  We have dishwashers for that now.

Electronic devices have become so cheap that we have entirely handed over mundane or complex tasks directly to computers.  Automatic braking devices recognise road conditions and adjust on your behalf, air-conditioning systems keep your environment optimum, dishwashers clean your crockery, iPods cling to your arm and cell-phones keep you connected.

Automatic devices surround us and simplify our lives.  But they look nothing like humans.

The only science-fiction style robots around are toys.  Wowwee’s Robosapien is designed to entertain children.  It’s only a foot high.  Even the Japanese, in love with all things robotic, haven’t found a way to replace humans entirely.

Economics is still at the heart of what went wrong.  Humans are cunning innovators.  We don’t just invent, we also make our inventions ever more efficient.  Prices come down, efficiency goes up and new uses for old ideas present themselves.

Humans are not looking to replace themselves and sit around doing nothing – what we want is to extend our grasp and maximise our reach.  Farmers don’t need robots wondering around with a hoe; they want crops that produce fantastic yields on limited nutrients and machines that increase their efficiency.  They don’t want to transport their goods to market, they want to process them as they work and package and distribute directly.

Inventions aren’t limited to engineering.  Manufacturing processing, management systems, economic and trade environments … all have come under scrutiny and sophisticated development.

Who needs a robot to drive your car when the car can drive itself?

If you want to imagine the future, don’t think that something else will manipulate the innovations of the future.  The innovations will drive themselves:  you’ll tell your music centre the type of music you want to listen to; crops will produce semi-processed food packed with extra vitamins and life-sustaining drugs; vehicles will navigate on their own; dinner will cook itself.

Unfortunately, you’ll still have to think to earn a living.