This is a popular science book dealing with information technology, robotics, and automation. Included are discussions of man-in-space, energy, and military technology.
Robots and other smart machines are not artificial people. They are made by real people, for real people - and sometimes against real people. They are made by the brains, passions, and money of real people. I am one of them. This is a story of what those real people have done.
You need neither science nor math nor need you be "mechanically inclined" to enjoy this book. It is a reading book, not a study book, and I promise that you will have no trouble understanding it. Also you will learn a few jargon words which may impress your friends.
I say these things with some confidence because of how the book came about. When I was running a robot company I was asked to talk to a university alumni organization about robots. They were bright people with liberal arts degrees but most with no science or math that they used or even remembered very well. I felt that a full talk on robots would get technical and boring so I spoke on "Smart Machines" with robots as a sub-topic. We all had a wonderful, animated evening and thence this book.
The book describes the many, many ways machine "smartness" both enriches our lives and threatens our lives. As you read, you will see things in your environment you never noticed before, you will recognize the effects of things you cannot get to see, and you will see through some of the self serving, hi-tech hype which is propagandized at you.
You will gain insight into the relative capabilities and limitations of people and machines and you will understand why each is better at different kinds of work. And you will become more aware of the effects of smart machines on the structure of our society.
Machine "smartness" is how machines do, without immediate human control, what they could do while under human control, except much better. Some of the things they do are physical:
For example, your home furnace is turned on and off by its thermostat without your being there to turn it on and off yourself. Your furnace and its thermostat comprise a rudimentary smart machine.
Some of the things smart machines deal with is information, like finding a file, or computing our income taxes, or relaying our conversations via a satellite which is 22,000 miles above the ground.
For examples, a computer is recording what I am now typing and it will make it very much easier for me to make changes than if I used an old fashioned typewriter. Another computer keeps track of my bank account and prints my monthly statement.
A "machine," here, is any contrivance made by people to help them do what they want done. It may be mechanical, electronic, pneumatic, hydraulic, or a combination of these and it may be powered by a human or by an engine. Screwdrivers, chain saws, computers, airplanes, and chemical plants are all machines.
The book deals primarily with the smartness which is itself part of machines, but many machines use the smartness of people as part of the overall smartness of those machines; for example, a car having automatic cruise control and an automatic transmission but being steered by a person.
In the past many machines were powered by animals, but, by the time machine smartness evolved, windmills, water wheels, and steam engines had arrived followed by internal combustion engines and electric motors. No animal powered smart machines have been made insofar as I know except for dog sleds which use both the power and the smartness of animals in following a trail. People power hand tools, of course, and the hand cranked kitchen apple peeler, human powered, has a class of smartness in following the contour of the apple which we will examine in some detail later on.
We will consider machines whose smartness in some ways greatly exceeds that of people, in other ways may be similar to that of people, and in other ways is far inferior to that of people.
Smart machines is a highly emotional subject. Smart machines affect jobs, markets, money, standards of living, education, health, and war. We will deal with all of these. Smart machines are not used directly in sex, politics, or religion but their indirect effects, via TV and film for example, is enormous. We will examine effects of smart machines on society as an introduction to an enormous body of information and opinion. There is both love and hate. I will try to spell out both, but I apologize for whatever imbalance I commit.
The book will tell you how smart machines came about and it will tell some stories of the engineers and scientists who brought them about. (It will not go into the business men and government officials who paid them to do it, usually motivated by a desire for profit or power. Without those decisions to pay them or invest in them, little would have been done outside academia and inventors garages.) The treatment of biography and anecdotes is intended to add some real life to an examination of machines which only emulate life. The book is not a full history of science and engineering; it gives only enough chronology to understand the major events and trends in the evolution of smart machines.
The descriptions and explanations of machines and their technology are as correct and complete as I can make them in a popular book, although a full catalog of smart machines, other than a list, is not included - it would be an encyclopedia.
I have described some classes of smart machines in some detail but I have only listed some other classes. I plan, in a future enlarged edition, to detail these superficially described classes.
This is a popular science book, not an engineering textbook, but different people have different depths of interest. Therefore I have copied a technique from the historian Will Durant and put more technical material in smaller type so it can be skipped without interfering with the the continuity of non-technical flow. The first use of a new word is capitalized."
Author's comments: I learned to write plain English as a proposal writer in General Dynamics; if my prospective customer did not easily understand my stuff he did not buy my product. In my own companies I continued to teach customers, with simple English, about new technology. Now, as an expert witness, I explain technology to lay jurors and hold their attention as well as their understanding. Friends say that they can hear my voice when they read my words. (Yes, I do re-read Strunk & White every year.) This book contains the philosophical essence of a long career inventing, designing, building, selling, and making work a broad spectrum of automatic machines and real industrial robots.
Chapter 2. Robots
Chapter 3. Intelligent Machines
Chapter 4. Can It Happen?
Once upon a time a sculptor named Pygmalion carved a statue of a girl. It was so very beautiful and lifelike that it did indeed come to life; he named her Galatea and they lived happily ever after and inspired a play and a musical comedy: "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady."
For as long as history and archaeology teach us, people have been carving magic idols, believing them to be sufficiently alive to hear and obey the prayers of their makers. ("Magic" is the control of the world without the restrictions of what killjoy scientists call "laws of nature.")
Animism is the most primitive form of religion; it attributes life and will to "the spirits of" trees and rocks and other objects. To this day some have the feeling that machines of metal and plastic have life and will. Have you, yourself, gentle reader, ever been angry with a car or a TV and struck or kicked it to punish its recalcitrance? A history of the development of a new computer was actually entitled "The Soul of a New Machine."
In the early days of the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards, a famous programmer, after a long period of frustration, went into the computer room and had a long talk with the machine in which she sincerely begged for a greater degree of cooperation. (I was told this by a friend of mine, an engineer who worked with her. She was most intelligent and capable and finally retired as an admiral.)
Human and superhuman behavior has had widespread attribution to inanimate objects resembling people. Icons, statues, badges, medals, amulets, and charms all perform magic. Some are displayed, some are carried in processions, and some are worn on the person. Many figure in horror fiction. A unique variant of the scapegoat idea is Oscar Wilde s fiction of the Picture of Dorian Gray in which a painting assumes the ugly changes in the appearance of a dissolute person.
Allegories use animals with human attributes to teach moral lessons. Totems are animals which represent groups of humans.
People have wanted to make artificial people for as long as recorded history. In ancient Egypt, priests stood in the hollow statue of a god and bellowed out the god's will. In the middle ages, when clockwork mechanisms were developed, articulated models of people were made, driven by springs or descending weights; there was even a mechanical man who wrote a few Chinese characters on paper, made as a gift to the emperor of China. A similar mechanical man, called The Scribe, built in 1770 by Pierre and Henrie-Louis Jaquet-Droz, is still in working order in the Swiss Musee d'Art et d'Histoire. Town clocks exhibiting a parade of animated characters (JACKWORK) have been refurbished as tourist attractions in Europe. Disney World has lifelike machines acting out scenes from American history as well as other jackwork displays. Every toy store has mechanical dolls.
Robots
The word "robot" was coined by a Czeck playwright, Karel Capek, in the early 1920's. He wrote a play called "R.U.R.: Rossums's Universal Robots" in which he used the word which he adapted from the Czeck word for work. The play is an ordinary sci-fi opus in which the mad scientist invents artificial people, lacking only souls, which he calls robots, to do the world's work. The robots rebel, but the good guys win. The play died but the word lived and is now the same in all languages. Science fiction also lived and there have been innumerable similar scripts for books and plays and movies. Even the ballet Copellia is about a robot girl with whom the living hero falls in love, and Pinocchio is a living wooden boy.
Another literary robot was the monster created by imaginary Dr. Frankenstein who was created by real Mary Shelley. The good doctor modestly re-combined existing parts instead of starting from scratch.
People continue to make stone, plaster, paint, and photo images and monuments which are felt to retain the spirit of the imaged and are displayed in public buildings, churches, private homes, parks, cemeteries, and processions.
The ultimate dream was, and is, a mechanical person who is the slave of a real person. This is pretty easy to accomplish in the imagination and became one of the staple themes of science fiction (one of the great oxymorons of all time.) Not so easy for real.
Science Fiction
This is a book of science fact, not a book of science fiction. I go out of my way to distinguish between science fact and science fiction in order to de-bunk some of the hype issued by self serving publicists. This hype is usually a distortion of truth or the use of misleading and suggestive words rather than outright fabrication.
Some engineers and inventors believe that science fiction is a stimulant to the creation of science fact. Whatever works for them is good, but it is fraud to present fantasy as fact to the lay world in order to get from it either prestige or profit."
Lawrence Kamm
1515 Chatsworth Blvd.
San Diego CA 92107
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