Robots, Empowerment, and Equity

The Second Coming of RoboticsFor more than half a century, robotics has evolved and advanced in strong health.Innovations of thought and innovations of technology have crystallized new capabilities, which in turn have catalyzed redefined relationships between humans and robots.Yet for most of this time, robotics itself has been a schizophrenic field, with one personality tended by the imagination of futurists and one personality enacted in the real ity of factory floors and research labs.The popular identity of robotics has strongly aligned with the suppositions of writers, beginning in the 1950s with the advent of ASTRO BOY to Japanese and then worldwide audiences.ASTRO BOY was a robot with emotion, empathy, and a desire to bring out the most positive human values in all that he touched.This idyllic view of robot-human relations defines just one pole of the science fiction spectrum, and by the time Terminator emerged in 1984, the opposite pole was irreversibly defined by the language of destruction-robots that are the physical and mental superior of humans bent on the destruction of all humanity.Yet the age of fictional robots forty years ago had little to do with the downstream ramifications of robotics research; the two robotic worlds were unconnected because the gap between fiction and real ity was impossibly large.Industrial and research robotics, in contrast, were concerned with motor control, primitive perception, reliability, and basic robot planning and problem-solving.This is not to suggest that the sense of agency so important to fictionalized robots was altogether missing in the coordinates of real-world robotics.In 1950, W. Grey Walter reported on the be hav ior of his circuit-controlled turtles as machines with the beginnings of agency.He was, reportedly, surprised to find that simple circuitry can suggest such a high-level embodiment of intentionality.Turning this discovery around, he 5 Robots, Empowerment, and Equity