To people of my generation, the concept of robots began first with Robby the Robot Toy of the 1950’s and more so with the stories of Isaac Asimov, and of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, science fiction at its height. We dreamed of a world of robots and androids and pondered weighty issues such as whether they would be programmed with a prime directive “to bring no harm to humans” and whether we would be so kind in return.
Well, fiction becomes truth! For decades robots built our automobiles, farmed our farms, baked and packaged cookies for us. But they were huge ungainly contraptions, and there was no sense that theycould be interacted with directly. Well, wake up Rip van Winkle! I find that I have come to consciousness in 2023 and encounter robots everywhere. They have crept up on us, and they now surround us, not necessarily in a threatening way but as our helpers. And, indeed, the word “consciousness” rings true. We have come to grapple with the question of their sentience and awareness, even if we like to tuck it away somewhere safe.
When I was a teenager I was very “into” amateur astronomy. Back then if you wanted to see something with your telescope, a star, planet, or galaxy say, you pulled out your Norton’s Star Atlas and carefully “star hopped” from some bright star following the map field by field until if you were lucky found the desired object. Recently, telescopes have evolved with various complex auto-alignment systems. Well, I will have to admit that with age crawling around in various awkward positions to look under and over my telescope to get it aligned, more often than not defeated me. It was all very frustrating! Recently I added the Celestron StarSense Autoalignment System to my telescope. It is a little robot that you tell to align my scope and it does. Then you tell it what you want to look at and it goes there and tracks the object. Purists may argue that this is very algorithmic and not true artificial intelligence. But it is truly marvelous, arguably the best thing ever, and it is robotics at its very best, since it takes a difficult task for humans adn makes it easy and trivial. That in the end is what robotics is all about. Farming the Earth and building automobiles is one thing, aligning my telescope quite another! I call my telescope Celeste. My telescope now is smart enough to have a name if not a soul.
Still there is the problem that I would like to have Celeste high on a mountain top and I would like her to have a larger aperture so that I could take marvelous astrophotographs. Enter the age of robotic eyes, telescopes that you can control remotely, all located in distant sites perfect for astrophotography – places like Nerpio, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. I took Figure 1 of Messier 51, the Great Whirlpool Nebula using a 12 inch robotic telescope (T18) on the iTelescope network. I have also used robotic telescopes on the Skygems Remote Observatories network. The proposition is a simple one. You control the telescope, either in real time or on a schedule, and the telescope takes the image. Then you download and image process it on your home computer. These encounters with robotic eyes are truly wonderful and enriching.
Purists will argue that this is not the same as taking the image yourself on your own telescope. I feel about this the same way that I feel about the argument that film-based analogue photograph is purer and better than digital photography. In fact, our cameras have become robots and through the combination of automatic analysis of the scene and high dynamic range digital imaging sensors have freed us of cumbersome analysis of the image, freed us to be artists. So often I hear “show me the camera’s raw image,” as if that were somehow truer and purer. I personally always shoot in raw, but I process, true to the point made by Ansel Adams that “You do’nt take a photograph. You make it.”
So three robots enriching my life anyway: the Celestron StarSense Autoalign, robotic telescopes, and my digital camera. I am truly Rip van Winkle, awakening in a Brave New World. To paraphrase Miranda in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,”
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous [machinekind] is! O brave new world
That has such [robots] in’t!
“Purists will argue”
(I think that sentence stands on its own)
In the analog/digital contretemps there’s the (pretty much unrefutable) Nyquist Theorem.
And there’s the recurring problem of purists “making a virtue of necessity”.
We might even anticipate the equivalent of the Nyquist frequency in robotics. Arthur C Clarke famously opined that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Combining the two, we might find that “any machine inference based on a sufficiently large sample of genuine human artifacts is indistinguishable from intelligence”. This is certainly one of the problems with “deep fakes” and ChatGPT disinformation.
I find myself trotting our two catch phrases when the conversation turns to artificial intelligence:
– “AI: Over 80 Years of TRIUMPHS, narrowly averted.”
– “Artificial Intelligence is thinly veiled Natural Stupidity”
In other words, if you just “dumb down” your expectations enough, anything the computer does or says looks intelligent.