I, Robot - a thought-provoking book

From the technical point of view of the miniaturization so far and the expected refinements in nanotechnology we can reach computers that will operate robots. The question is how close are we to the independent thinking of those robots? * Crown Publishing 2004, 249 p.

A reissue with an up-to-date translation of Isaac Asimov's book, I, Robot. Translation: Uri Balsam.
Selfish the robot

The book I, Robot has already been published in a Hebrew translation. It was in 1973, published by the late Masada and with the more appropriate name - Anochi the Robot (the word "anochi" means that the robot understands that it has self-awareness). This publishing house should be credited with its contribution to the golden generation of science fiction that hit Israel a decade late compared to the rest of the world - in the mid and late seventies, the peak of which was Fantasy 2000. In my private library, I have over a dozen books by Asimov, some of them from Masada publishers such as the Steel Caves, Ketz As the immortal time and of course the three original Mossad books. I didn't actually find the robot ego, and I really wanted to know if there was any connection between the movie I watched at the pre-premiere screening on behalf of the 'Guys' website or not.
Then I came across news on the Internet about the book being republished by Keter Publishing.
Asimov's biography

Isaac Asimov is considered by many to be a genius. The closest thing to a human typewriter, a natural wonder…. His writing career spanned over 45 years during which he published 477 books in almost every genre of fiction and non-fiction. It is clear of course that the quantity comes at the expense of the quality in some cases, or maybe Asimov wrote on purpose so that teenagers could read his books without looking for help in other books.
Asimov was born in Petrovich, Russia in 1920 and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York with his parents when he was three years old. He was accepted to Columbia University at the age of 15 and received his first degree - Bachelor of Science in 1939, and in 1942 his work on the doctorate was interrupted when he served as a chemist in the US Navy until 1945. After receiving his doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1948, Dr. Asimov worked as an instructor of biochemistry at the medical school of Boston University and was promoted to associate professor in 1951. Although he switched to writing full time in 1958, Dr. Asimov became a full professor in 1979. He liked to work in seclusion in his two-room office where his private library of over 2,000 books also resided. Asimov lived in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan with his wife, the psychiatrist and author Janet O'Jepson (with whom he also co-wrote the Norby the Robot series, a science fiction series for teenagers). Asimov died on April 6, 1992. The official cause given at the time was kidney failure. A decade later, his wife Janet published a biography of Asimov in which she admitted that Asimov died of AIDS, which he contracted through a blood transfusion in bypass surgery ten years earlier, when awareness of the existence of AIDS was still low.
Asimov's writing

Asimov wrote a huge number of books. The "Good Doctor" began writing science fiction at the age of 11. His complete book Chaluk Ibn Barakie was published by Doubledi in 1950, and he also turned to writing popular science in a textbook he published in 1951. Since then, Asimov has written about almost everything under the sun, from mathematics, to physics, from the Bible to Shakespeare. Among his books were bestsellers all over the world such as the books of the Mossad series, Robots of Dawn. In addition, he received a special Hugo Award in honor of his Mossad trilogy, which was the best science fiction series of all time. He also won a Hugo for the book Fati HaMossad in 1981. In 1987, Asimov received a special Nabiola Award from the Science Fiction Writers Association of America which declared him a Grand Master of Science Fiction. He has received numerous other Hugo and Neviola awards for a selection of other books.
The book Selfish the Robot, as well as many other books of Asimov are known all over the world, in Russia, where he was born, he is one of the most recognized translated authors. Teenagers and adults, anyone who likes science fiction stories, reads and enjoys Asimov's books. His books influence the way people see the future, their goals and ideas. An example of this: twenty years ago there was a man named Casey Cowell who founded his own small company. He loved Asimov and enjoyed reading The Selfish Robot. The book told about a company called US Robots. It was the company that first introduced a mobile robot equipped with the possibility of voice activation. In the end, U.S. Robots and Mechanical Man Corporation have become the most powerful and sophisticated companies in the world. Casey Cowell dreamed of a similar future for his company and despite the fact that his company had nothing to do with robots, he decided to name his little company US. Robotics. 27 years have passed and now Casey Cowell is the chairman, president and CEO of a large and progressive company - U.S. Robotics, one of the leading companies in information access systems and has branches all over the world. His dream came true. Should its success be attributed to Asimov's book The Selfish Robot? I think the book might have given him some ideas and a series of goals.

About the book 'I, Robot'

'I, Robot' (you have to get used to the new name in Hebrew) is one of the most important books in Asimov's life. It is one of the books that built Asimov's reputation, when it began as a series of stories in the Golden Age monthly "Amazing MDB Stories" (and in fact, some argue that it was the book that made the Golden Age such). The book contains relatively short stories, a robot anthology that shows us the relationship between humans and robots from the time when the most basic robots were created to the time when computers took over the economy, progress and the future of humanity. In the book, robots and characters (including the immortal Susan Calvin) stand there in their own right. The stories are logically related. Throughout the book, Asimov describes the life of robo-psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin. The book is based on stories about robots that she tells the author or stories in which she is one of the heroes. She is an expert on robotics. At the end of the book she says: "I saw everything from the beginning, from those days when the screen robots could not speak, to the end, when they stand between humanity and its destruction."
The idea of ​​robo-psychological necessity in a robot factory is a big idea, and it shows that Asimov, who wrote his stories in the XNUMXs, clearly saw the importance that the connection between machines and humans could have. In the book, Susan Calvin tries to analyze the behavior and language of the robots that were designed and created by humans, but at the same time surpass their creators in almost every task and role. An important part of her analyzes are the three laws of robotics (only the laws are translated by Emanuel Lotem):
1. A robot shall not harm a human being, and shall not assume, by default, that a human being will be harmed.
2. A robot must obey the commands of a person, provided that these commands do not contradict the first law.
3. A robot must protect its existence, provided that this protection does not contradict the first law or the second law.

The three laws of robotics are another important element in the book that serves as a connecting thread between the nine stories. It can be said that this is the part of the book that many people know even if they have not read The Selfish Robot. The laws were written in the early XNUMXs. They show that Asimov understood the importance of this subject even before it existed in reality. However, it is almost certain that the three laws are not just the fertile imagination of a genius. The laws are natural: a machine must not injure a person in any way. This is the first and most important law for anyone devoting their life to computers, robotics or any other type of machinery.

The story is a lie!A mind-reading robot is created. It seems unbelievable, but four senior researchers at U.S. Robots have become victims of their own creation, and perhaps also of the laws of robotics. The robot felt and knew the deepest thoughts and pains of the people around him and tried to do everything he could to make them happy. However, he did so by convincing them that their dreams, ambitions and even their most hidden desires would come true. He fails when he tries to convince Calvin that the man of her dreams really loves her. When this turned out to be false, Calvin lost control and attacked the robot in anger, forcing him to burn his own brain due to the paradox of being aware of people's aspirations without having the ability to fulfill those aspirations. This is an interesting problem related to human psychology and ethics. Often times, what we need to be happy is unattainable or can even be harmful.

the story 'vision'

A dramatic and interesting story is the Raya story, about Steven Birley, a lawyer who ran a political office. Some people said that he is not human. They said he was a robot. Birley proved his humanity by attacking a man. Susan Calvin realized that there might be a scam here and that the person he hit might be another robot, and this might prove that Birley is a robot. There are two interesting moments: first, when Birley proves that the public attack simulates human ethics, and second, when Dr. Calvin lets him go when she realizes that it is better to have a good robot as a political figure than to have this position filled by a bad person.
The story: A conflict that can be avoided

An interesting picture of the future. The economy of every planet is controlled by super-positronic minds - the machines. They know what they are doing and what they are doing is proving to be a better, more wonderful future than what humanity could have organized on its own. Susan Kelvin says: This means that 'the machine manages our future for us not only in the simple sense of direct answers to direct questions but as a general answer to the state of the world and human psychology in general. "Consider that from now on and forever, all conflicts can be avoided, only the machines are inevitable."
Strengths and weaknesses of the book

I, Robot is a readable book. Asimov does not use unfamiliar technological terms, his language is clear and simple. Most of the stories have many action scenes, which are hard to stop reading. The book is good but it also brings some serious thoughts and difficult questions. Is this a strength or a weakness of the book? All the topics raised by Asimov in his book have become important precisely now. Already today we depend on computers and remember what a small malfunction at an airport causes. Apparently the revolution cannot be stopped, nor is there any need. We need to fulfill the three laws of robotics that Asimov wrote in the 20s and hope that we don't end up in a world of machines where humans will be at most fish in an aquarium owned and controlled by machines.

In any case, it was nice to remember, and it is recommended for those who want to get to know the history closely, and it is also very interesting to read it from the perspective of 2004, when real reason is far from us just as it was during the Second World War. One thing is true, the many miles of relays and photoelectric cells have given way to a spongy ball of plantinomyridium the size of a human brain. Well, not exactly - not yet platinum iridium but silicon but the scientists are already working on the next generations - optical computers and DNA computers. In terms of miniaturization, we will probably reach what Asimov expected quite quickly. Will the robots be smart or just behave according to their programming? We will probably know this only when at least a similar period has passed since the writing of the book 'I, Robot' until today.

And one more thing, in the book, as in the movie, the fourth law is actually revealed (it took Asimov some more time to formulate it explicitly). This is the zero law, which is actually a slight modification of the first law, which becomes: "A robot shall not adversely harm humanity, and shall not assume, by default, that humanity will be harmed." In exchange for protecting humanity, the robots may also sacrifice certain humans.

Robotics in reality 2004

Are we even close to robots that will even try to adopt the three laws? It seems not. Today's robots are machines, even stupid machines. The book is of course about talking robots in 2002 and robots running the world until the middle of the 21st century.
It is common to say that short-term technological forecasts are usually guilty of over-optimism, that is, the development in reality, if it occurs, takes much longer and in the end its direction is also completely different (how many people predicted a color fax in the XNUMXs? and never realized their vision, how many of them predicted an integrated printer in a fax And the scanner? And why did it take ten years after the color fax was supposed to enter the market according to those forecasts?) Here we have an excellent example of a long-term forecast that is not accurate to say the least.

So close, so far
Even in the sixty years that have passed since the book was written, we are not even close to the extreme zero of the artificial intelligence that should have allowed robots to have even minimal self-awareness, not even like a baby's or unlike a dog's or a cat's. It is true that the industrial robots, or the robot vacuum cleaners are all programmable and are limited in their movements and their ability to analyze. Of course they don't have even the slightest discretion to easily do things that are not in their plan.
It is true that good programming and multiple parts in the robot's body that can be operated can create an external impression of intelligence and independence, but they are no more independent than software for making business decisions on an enterprise computer. We will tell you briefly about three robots from those that made headlines in the last year:

1. Sony's QRIO robot successfully played an entire orchestra. The 58-centimeter-tall humanoid robot led the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony during a concert held at the "Bunkamura Orchard" hall in Tokyo on March fifteenth (and it should be noted that about a week later I saw him, or rather two like him, at the opening of the Sevit exhibition in Germany) .

2. Researchers from the Jaume University in Spain are currently working on the development of a robot designed to replace the role of librarians in public libraries. The robot is equipped with cameras, sensors and sophisticated arms. The robot is able to identify books and pull them off the shelf. The hope is that one day such robots will be able to staff public libraries and help the public find the reading material they are looking for.
The librarian robot is equipped with voice recognition software, the library visitor just needs to say the name of the book so that the robot can search for it in its database. After the robot has identified the desired book, it makes its way to the estimated location of the book and then scans all the books within a radius of 4 meters in order to locate the exact book.
The scanning itself is done with the help of special cameras attached to the robot's arm, the camera picks up the inscription that appears on the cover of the books and with the help of letter recognition software the robot literally reads the names of the books until it reaches the desired book.

3. The first Robonaut took its first steps recently during experiments at the Johnson Space Center in Houston with the help of a single "space leg", which it uses to move outside the simulation of a space station. Additional tests placed the humanoid robot on wheels, on a Segway for accuracy, and let it go. With wheels or a space leg, the robonaut's head, back, arms and mechanical hands retained their ability to use space tools much like humans.
In the tests, in which the robot moves with its space leg, the Robonaut looks like a futuristic construction worker outside a simulated spaceship. With the help of the Segway's wheels, which are stabilized with gyroscopes, the Robonaut floated from one experimental station to another, as one day its descendants might do on the moon or Mars.
The tests of the leg confirmed the fact that the Robonaut will be able to climb the outer side of a spacecraft with the help of handles, while positioning its leg at a certain work site to make repairs or install parts. NASA's goal is to build robots that can "live" on the outer side of spacecraft and be prepared for routine maintenance or emergencies. Humans inside the spacecraft will operate the Robonaut using wireless control.
In order for us to reach independent robots, such as those taken from Asimov's books, we will first have to achieve breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence that will bring such a robot to full autonomy, even in situations it was not designed for, and further progress in miniaturization by several orders of magnitude would not hurt. The question is whether we even want to develop such robots is already a question that is not in the field of science.

Avi Blizovsky is the editor of the science website