Page 3 - Unlikely Stories 4

Quintessence

on to deconstruct the processes of life and reconstruct them
mechanically. This has been going on as separate ventures since the
1940s and the discovery of cybernetics and the basic building blocks
of organic complexity. Today, as an integrated endeavor, it can
simply be called biosimulation. It follows the developmental path of
other technologies, proceeding from crude, rough inefficient
products through a take-off phase enabled by scientific
breakthroughs to arrive at optimized consumer goods with a value to
Wall Street: a technology whose novelty may be very valuable until it
matures and becomes just another utility of everyday life.
My company saw its opportunity in pulling together all the various
threads involved in—or could be useful in—creating what is too
simply called a humanoid robot. Those inventions, you must be
aware, are moving rapidly to more perfected forms, driven by
economic necessity and our heedless monkey-brain quest to be the
first at solving a puzzle. So an assortment of disparate devices are
talking with you on telephones and computer screens, making
tailored suggestions for purchases and diagnosing disease, providing
care and amusement for the elderly and the infantile, and performing
unsupervised maintenance, transportation and manufacturing tasks.
Now, get this: there is also in our culture a powerful, if dangerous
and self-destructive, desire to create an automaton that will replace
humans in ways that are often more fantasy than reality: the sex
robot, the soldier or policeman robot, the tireless domestic worker—
all aspects of a single wish: to interact with an obedient and
uncomplaining drudge that serves us in every possible aspect of
existence. You know, that’s where the word “robot” comes from, the
Czech word for a slave, the person forced into labor.
And who is to determine what we want? Yes, we vote with our
dollars, as it were. And motivational research has provided some in-
depth analysis of what makes us tick. But it is not always so
obvious—we have egos, and subcultures and neuroses. My former
employer hired several social scientists to provide typologies and
archetypes of human desire, conscious and unconscious. They
synthesized all these ideas from academic works as well as popular
psychology. That put us ahead of the other developers: they were in
their separate silos, focused on improving one function per android.

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