I/Robot...
Battlestar Galactica’s finale largely sucked, with the same hand-waving explanations blaming everything on a higher power(read God) which plagued Harry Potter’s finale plaguing this series too. For more discussion of this, you can go to http://cinemablend.com/television/Why-The-Battlestar-Galactica-Finale-Is-A-Huge-Copout-And-It-Doesn-t-Matter-16337.html I am surprised that these otherwise astute authors and scriptwriters don’t realize that they have clearly bitten off more than they can chew. They just keep starting more and more strings right till the end of the series. I think that the problem stems from the fact that they don’t have a clear idea of how to close the strings when they open them up and are just hoping that things will kinda tie up on their own as they near the end of the story. Sadly, it rarely happens and we are left with an unexplained, if intriguing, mess. Stephen King actually discussed this issue at length in his Dark Tower series and openly admits that he had no idea how to end his story for 20 years. But when he finally did end it, oh boy, did he do it well. One of the very few series that led to a satisfying conclusion.
Anyway, for all its demerits, the BSG finale did spark an interesting line of thought in me. While our urge for technological progress is perfectly explicable, our urge to build humanoid robots is a little more intriguing. I can understand that we want to build robots, but why humanoid robots? Why not things that don’t have a head, have four arms and four legs? Why this determination to model ourselves?
I can think of three reasons for this. A totally unemotional answer may say the human body is a pretty efficient machine so it is only natural to try and model it. My answer to that is that the human body is a very inefficient machine, as has been proved time and over. Maybe I will add a link to a paper showing this later. However, I admit that the human body is a pretty wondrous machine (but after millions of years of evolution, it couldn’t have been anything else!). Therefore, maybe just trying to model that is a good place to start and we can get to the improvements later. Anyway, that’s one explanation.
The second reason has to do with our natural urge to procreate, I think. We have been genetically programmed to procreate(hence our programmed liking of errr…the acts that lead to procreation), so making humanoid robots is a manifestation of that urge. Because in the end if we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans in every way, we have essentially procreated. This keeps driving us to make robots more and more similar to humans.
And finally, I think the third reason is that we simply want to play God(for lack of a better word!). No matter whatever else we do, God has one better over us till we can make ourselves. Our ego makes us believe that we are really special(and most religions encourage this belief heartily!) and creating ourselves will therefore be the pinnacle of our achievements. To make ourselves is just about the best challenge we could have been given.
The reasons I have listed here vary from the coldly practical to the totally intangible but I suspect that it is the intangible ones that drive this quest of ours more. And we are getting nearer everyday. For the brains, the progress in AI in the last 3-4 years has been astounding and the Japanese are doing a marvelous job on the body front. The irony is, for all our natural urges to make these robots, it seems that most of us believe that these robots will lead to our doom, which can be seen from the fact that most SF novels with robots as their central theme end up showing a dystopian future(with Asimov as the major exception here). Me, I’d just be so excited when these robots finally get done that I don’t really care if they take over the earth after that. So please get cracking, all you scientists out there!
Battlestar Galactica’s finale largely sucked, with the same hand-waving explanations blaming everything on a higher power(read God) which plagued Harry Potter’s finale plaguing this series too. For more discussion of this, you can go to http://cinemablend.com/television/Why-The-Battlestar-Galactica-Finale-Is-A-Huge-Copout-And-It-Doesn-t-Matter-16337.html I am surprised that these otherwise astute authors and scriptwriters don’t realize that they have clearly bitten off more than they can chew. They just keep starting more and more strings right till the end of the series. I think that the problem stems from the fact that they don’t have a clear idea of how to close the strings when they open them up and are just hoping that things will kinda tie up on their own as they near the end of the story. Sadly, it rarely happens and we are left with an unexplained, if intriguing, mess. Stephen King actually discussed this issue at length in his Dark Tower series and openly admits that he had no idea how to end his story for 20 years. But when he finally did end it, oh boy, did he do it well. One of the very few series that led to a satisfying conclusion.
Anyway, for all its demerits, the BSG finale did spark an interesting line of thought in me. While our urge for technological progress is perfectly explicable, our urge to build humanoid robots is a little more intriguing. I can understand that we want to build robots, but why humanoid robots? Why not things that don’t have a head, have four arms and four legs? Why this determination to model ourselves?
I can think of three reasons for this. A totally unemotional answer may say the human body is a pretty efficient machine so it is only natural to try and model it. My answer to that is that the human body is a very inefficient machine, as has been proved time and over. Maybe I will add a link to a paper showing this later. However, I admit that the human body is a pretty wondrous machine (but after millions of years of evolution, it couldn’t have been anything else!). Therefore, maybe just trying to model that is a good place to start and we can get to the improvements later. Anyway, that’s one explanation.
The second reason has to do with our natural urge to procreate, I think. We have been genetically programmed to procreate(hence our programmed liking of errr…the acts that lead to procreation), so making humanoid robots is a manifestation of that urge. Because in the end if we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans in every way, we have essentially procreated. This keeps driving us to make robots more and more similar to humans.
And finally, I think the third reason is that we simply want to play God(for lack of a better word!). No matter whatever else we do, God has one better over us till we can make ourselves. Our ego makes us believe that we are really special(and most religions encourage this belief heartily!) and creating ourselves will therefore be the pinnacle of our achievements. To make ourselves is just about the best challenge we could have been given.
The reasons I have listed here vary from the coldly practical to the totally intangible but I suspect that it is the intangible ones that drive this quest of ours more. And we are getting nearer everyday. For the brains, the progress in AI in the last 3-4 years has been astounding and the Japanese are doing a marvelous job on the body front. The irony is, for all our natural urges to make these robots, it seems that most of us believe that these robots will lead to our doom, which can be seen from the fact that most SF novels with robots as their central theme end up showing a dystopian future(with Asimov as the major exception here). Me, I’d just be so excited when these robots finally get done that I don’t really care if they take over the earth after that. So please get cracking, all you scientists out there!
posted by Akshat Jain at 12:42 PM
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