Robotics…

This notion sounds familiar to many, nowadays, and belongs to our day to day life. Whatever its name is (domotics, electronics...) anyone living in an industrialized country knows about it and it may seem pointless to define it. However, finality of robots evolved a lot through recent times, so that today, this word applies to any kind of fairly sophisticated device. But Robotics was once a science, far more ambitious than what it became...
Indeed this concept, that our generation appropriated, is far from new, and it’s easy to track it down to the antiquity. The notion of “robots” first belonged to greek mythology and is important in the story of the king of Cyprus. He fell in love with a statue he’d sculpted, and that goddess Aphrodith decided to bring to life so that they could get married. Even if by then, the abitility to bring things to life and to give them intelligence was of divine nature, the idea of what a robot is already exists. As a matter of facts, 2500 years later, Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clark (well-known creator of the HAL-9000) would say that any far advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. No doubt our technology would seem magic to the men living by the time of the king of Cyprus...
Let’s then admit as a fact that we have here the first robot in history. From popular tales to legends, robots have forever been our mates. It is noteworthy that from the beginning, the idea of robot was nearly exclusively applying to a humanoïd form. A robot had to look like a man. But why would a “machine” or an “animated statue” have to be human-like rather than something else?
Often did I ask my fellows the question, and few of them could answer, whereas this was obvious for our ancestors... Which is an evidence that our technology weakened, to a certain extend, the soul and grandeur of robotics. In order to have a machine moving easily in our environment, using our tools, interact with us and exploit our knowledge, it has to be like us! Only a humanoïd system could drive a car, use a knife, a computer, serving the coffee... with a unique morphology.

Let’s then not talk anymore about the form a true robot would take. It has to be a humanoïd in every point similar to us.
If the Greeks thought only gods could create such individuals, someone called René Descartes revolutionned the vision mankind had on robots making. Indeed, Descartes introduces the concept of mecanical man and explains, more or less successfully, that we’re nothing but a clockwork, for sure incredibly complex, but reproducible. If by Descartes’ time one could already figure that a clockwork system could reproduce or imitate the most important functionalities of the human body, as far as intelligence was concerned (or soul, thought, whatever you want...) it was left up to God, only Him being able to perform such a feat.
But few time later, another philosopher, Pascal, developped the Pascaline, the first automatic calculator in History. Even mechanical, this wonderful (not less) machine could independently perform operands and thus became the first to carry out the principle of data computation, that hadn’t even been theorized yet!
And thus some “fools” begun to dream about those famous clockwork men by Descartes, whose cognition functions would be provided by some super-pascaline. The idea of robot in a modern fashion, as a man-built object rather than god-designed, was born.

Then came the 20th century when the possibility of a “robot”, throughout science-fiction works, was invented (I’d rather say rediscovered). I won’t talk about these (even if I’m seriously eager to) for this isn’t this website purpose. What matters is that robot became popular again in the imaginations, and not only a conceptual construction for a happy few.
Many a scientist growing up in the 1920’s were flooded with robots in magazines and movies so that generation “invented” the computer that, as far as I am concerned, is nothing more than our supr-pascaline, if not for the electricity replacing the spring activating mechanical ruptors. Those first computers, blinking monsters that our kids are laughing about were nonetheless extraordinary, for they allowed men to achieve calculation which complexity was such that no brain could perform them within a lifetime. At first a military machine, the AC (ENIAC, UNIVAC and so on) would flood laboratories and calculation bit became less of a luxury.
Faced to those machines able to perform hundreds of operations in a second of time, men grew humble and begun to think that maybe their far offspring could match the human brain. Clarke’s HAL-9000 or Asimov’s R-Daneel, still unbelievable today, are the imaginary childs of the ACs...
For it is sad but true! The ACs, that we call today “big systems”, have their minds splited to serve as networks hubs for our internet connexions, that we can’t live without today and who did not even exist ten years before... Anyway, ACs’ descendants are far too specialized, and far too expensive to be the super-pascaline robots need. Fortunatly, home computers exploded in the 1970’s and PCs are so widespread that it is almost impossible not to be familiar with such devices in our industrialized societies. Our processing power is so high, so cheap and so reasonnably sized today that the first ACs seem ridiculous. Electronic systems are everywhere, from our car to our shaver and the water bill. At the same time computer spread, robotics progressed, of course, but in my opinion, they have also stagnated and even regressed.

Obviously did they progress. GPS or cell phones show it. Stagnation is not that obvious, but it’s enough to see how computation and programmation technics have brought nothing fundamentally new in ten years... Something’s rotten in the kingdom of robotics ambitions! Descartes and Pascal dreamt about a machinal man that would be able to perform any human action. They thought it was possible. Nowaday, in spite of our hyper calculators, the biggest laboratories indulge themselves having poor soulless robots walking and running for an indecent amount of money.

It is commonly admitted today that despite the power of our computaion system, we cannot reproduce, even partly, the human psyche. I think this would seem quite fun to the philosophers and theoreticists of past times. We’re proud of our technologies, as long as virtuality and telecommunication are concerned, but we quited on cognitive robotics, and we make do working on luxuous automaton working on old algorithmic theories or on small automated systems, quite simply to enjoy ourselves.

Robotics is nowadays in a technical dead end, and motivation vanished. Of course our machines are highly sophisticated, but they run on aging and worn out sciences. Our machines aren’t powerful enough, the min dis too complex to be imitated... Have a word with Plato an Freud about that! Height of the horror, computer became an aim in itself, and not a tool to transcend laws of cognition. Roboticists walked away on human psyche specialists (philosophers, psychologists ans psychoanalysts) to get closer from neuro-biologists. Instead of trying to understand the way psyche works, they try to imitate the way brain computes. At this this point you got it, I’m not the greatest fan of robotics as it exists nowadays, and seldom am I impressed with robots. I feel that anytime a roboticist talks, he only refers to biological researches, or to whatever theory of evolution or brain area it is.

Nature works in a far more complicated way, for it includes pseudo-chaotic principles that our computation systems can’t reproduce. From that we’re told, in a nearly religious way, that Artificial Intelligence (and that’s even truer for Artificial conscience) is unreachable in a close future. But this point of view forgets how nature goes to the simpler, and although our biology is complex (brain with billions of interconnected nerve cells), you only have to study the case of simple animals (bees, ants...) to realize that even a pseudo-brain is able to compute with no trouble a Psyche that be thorough enough to make an individual self-suficient, social and functionnal.

We must then state that the essence of the intellect not only lies in available processing power, but in the rationality exploiting this processing power.

Ultraconservative scientists that want to offer themselves expensive toys that hop or carry a tray are too “scientific” to be willing to get closer to those who have the true knowledge of conscience. Philosophy and science indeed consumated their divorce during the past century, which may be the biggest tragedy in History. You can’t be a honourable scientist and be keen on philosophy or psychoanalysis... It is not right, period. I think our Descartes and Pascal must be must be turning in their graves...

Last but not least, our distinguished roboticists, so clever when it comes to make their priceless toys walk around, indulge themselves perfecting an outdated and futureless technic (conventionnal algorithms). Same thing about nerve-cells’ net, but I’ll discuss this later. We’re overcrowded with expensive machines that can do everything and nothing, and that are supposed to improve for the umpteenth time the umpteeth improvment. To crown it all, those machines wouldn’t even impress someone having lived by the beginning of the nineteenth century. And we call ourselves happy...

But where is the dream of the mechanical man ? Is it still relevant? Is it that unworkable?

We didn’t anything else to look into the problem...