If you want to name the world's most famous robot, Doraemon can definitely be at the top. Born in the 22nd century, this robot nicknamed "Blue Fat Man" is not only man's most powerful assistant, but also his closest friend. The friendship between Doraemon and Nobita Nobita, through ordinary bits and pieces, is undoubtedly sincere and moving. He will be angry because others call him "Tanuki", and will also reason with Nobita Nobita in a serious way, teaching him to learn to be self-reliant.
Possess the ability to transcend human beings themselves, while at the same time having human personality, emotions and even character defects. Doraemon is precisely an ideal trend in the development of robots in the human mind: robots are becoming more and more human-like.
But imposed goodwill can also become malice. Arthur Clark's 1969 book 2001, the ship's supercomputer hal9000, is typical of this type of "evil" robot. Robots possess the human mind and ability to think, and use them to the extreme, but this also sows the seeds of destruction: in order to maintain consistency in the pursuit of truth and concealment of the truth, robots slaughter the humans on the spaceship. Doraemon and Hal9000 can be said to be two forks in the human imagination of future robots. People create robots according to their own appearance, and naturally they will predict the development of robots according to their own experience. Compared with the ignorance and powerlessness of human beings in the face of their own destiny, robots, as human creations, should be controlled by human beings. However, just as humans often shout to rebel against their own fate and be their masters, why can't robots rebel against humans?
The development of the times has made us more and more skeptical about the difference between man and machine. Workers working on assembly lines in the industrial age, like the regular rotation of gears, do not need to add any self-reflection. The development of artificial intelligence technology has made the difference between machines and humans smaller and smaller. When tens of millions of young people with the name of "white-collar workers" travel to and from the company's cubicle room and a three-square-meter rental house every day, Google intelligent robots experience the thrill of parkour in the field.
Machines are becoming more and more like people, and people are becoming more and more like machines. Is the common future of humans and machines going to Doraemon or to hal9000? The following timeline of robot development, or evolution, may give a possible answer – although in the inevitable world of robots, "maybe" is a machine's "mistake" .
This article is from the b04-b05 edition of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly on January 29, which features "I• Machine, Man"
Written by | Lee Shane
1st century AD
Hiro of Alexandria discovered the principles of steam power and siphon and applied them to machine making. Many Kit Kat robots were created. These include birds that make sounds driven by water, dolls that drink water automatically, and robots that play trumpets with air compression principles in hand. The working principle of these machines directly affected a series of mechanical game mechanisms in later generations. In the era of the Roman Empire, the emperor Claudius, who was known for his foolish madness in the annals of history, in order to show off his power, specially held a grand entertainment performance in Lake Fucci in central Italy. He arranged for the trumpet-honking robot to make a grand appearance. But in the middle of the performance, the machine suddenly broke down and could not move. The enraged emperor went so far as to order the craftsmen who made the machines to come on stage to perform hand-to-hand duels to please the angry and bloodthirsty audience.
The prank mechanisms in the palace estates of the late Middle Ages are also inspired by Gerro's designs. In the 14th-century Castle of Esdan in Calais, Robert II, Count of Antuy, ordered the construction of a complete set of mechanical dolls to entertain visitors, including mechanical monkeys in real monkey skins, sports horns, mechanical elephants and rams, and wild boar heads. By the 15th century, Philip III, robert II's successor, had completely renovated the mechanism. It is designed with many machine tricks to trick tourists, and the main function is to make the unsuspecting visitor wet and wet again:
Around the first century AD, the Greek mathematician Alexandria's Hiro invented a schematic diagram of the steam ball.
"Portraits of three figures, random sprays of water to wet tourists ... There are female tourists who sprinkle water when they come, there is a device, if you touch the knob, it starts to hit your face, another device, but whenever you pass in front of it, it will pat your head and shoulders... Eight tubes were connected below, and whenever the ladies approached, they sprayed water on them. ”
This set of prank machines is famous – notoriety from another point of view, but everyone can't help but feel the feeling of being drenched by the machine. The famous 16th-century philosopher Montaigne visited a noble summer garden outside Augsburg, where he found that the prank machines there were not only reckless but also indecent, and specially squirted water while the women were watching the fish, "the water was flush with the people, and the skirts and thighs of these women were all wet."
This prank machine declined until the late 17th century, for unknown reasons, most likely because people's tolerance for pranks decreased with the increase of social civilization. But the funny effect it caused has been passed down to this day, and in today's classic animation "Tom and Jerry", Tom Cat is often sprayed by Jerry Mouse's faucet out of nowhere.
The Tom and Jerry cartoon discussed the theme of machine intelligence regurgitation in 1967.
Around 1400
The so-called "divine machines" began to flourish. These include the statue of Jesus, a machine that can pull a strand of hair to move the eyes and lips, a displeased and loud roaring machine devil, and a variety of flying machine angels. Of these sacred machines, the most famous is the mechanical clock "Three Kings Bell" of the Strasbourg Cathedral. It was built between 1352 and 1354 and renovated between 1540 and 1574. A robotic rooster stood on the Three Kings Bell with its head raised, flapping its wings and chirping loudly. Below the rooster, the astrolabe rotates, and the Three Doctors of the East and the Virgin and Child appear. The Roman gods represent the different days of the week; a baby, a teenager, a soldier, and an old man represent each of the four stages of life, each of which rings the bell at each quarter of an hour; and when the old man strikes the last quarter of an hour, the mechanical Jesus appears, but then he withdraws to make way for death, who strikes the bell with a bone.
Such divine machines have had great success in attracting believers. Priests can use this to promote a range of teachings. This would have been a mutually beneficial good thing, but it irritated devout believers who believed that these divine machines diverted people's eyes from the real gods and focused on false machine idols. During the Reformation in the 16th century, a large number of sacred machines were destroyed. Nevertheless, many sacred machines survived the hand of devout reformers, and the craftsmen who were keen to make sacred machines in the past turned heavily to the secular realm. After being freed from the shackles of the sacred machine, machine technology was reborn, and more secular machines for non-religious purposes were designed. Among them is Leonardo da Vinci's Robotic Knight.
The chronology of this article is based on Jessica Riskin's book, The Never-Ending Clock: Machines, The Kinetic Energy of Life, and the Formation of Modern Science. The Never-Ending Clock: Machines, Life Kinetic Energy, and the Formation of Modern Science, by Jessica Riskin, translated by Wang Dan, Zhu Cong, Xinsi | CITIC Publishing Group, July 2020 edition.
Whimsical fantasies from 1640 to 1816
The philosopher Descartes visited a machine wonder in the garden cave of Saint-Germain-León: "The mechanical sea god Neptune took a trident and forked them forward." The audience fled into the wilderness, then chased by the sea monsters, sprayed with water all over their faces. "The visit triggered a brainstorming. After the others laughed, the philosopher glimpsed the truth of the world in the machine: "The essence of the animal and the human body is mechanical."
Descartes' point of view was to interpret all aspects of life from a mechanical point of view, just as thoroughly as a watchmaker understood how clocks work. Descartes wrote his theory of the animal machine into his famous treatise The World, and again expounded this idea in another famous work, Methodology. The book sparked two centuries of widespread discussion. Europe's most prominent philosophers, theologians, physicians and scientists have joined the discussion of the relationship between man and machine. And one of the epoch-making is a robotic duck.
Being able to eat and defecate is not surprising to a duck, but if it is a robotic duck that does so, then it becomes a miracle. It was a live performance in 1738, and first it chewed and swallowed some corn and grain; then it paused meaningfully; and finally it defecated through its tail. It attracts people from all over Europe because of its last stinking excretion.
Wo kangsong, the maker of the robot duck, is very secretive about the principle of duck defecation, and he only claims to be "imitating nature", allowing the food that the duck eats to break down in the body like a real animal and then become feces and excreted. This has sparked controversy, with opponents arguing that it is nothing more than a prank, but supporters seeing it as proof that humans can create machine creatures in the same way that the Creator created humans. Or, furthermore, it confirms that both animals and humans are essentially nothing more than machines.
La Metelli is arguably one of Waucanson's most loyal fans, but what sets him apart from other fans is that he writes books and speaks. When his first book, The Nature of the Soul, was burned for angering the Church, he ran to Leiden, where he completed the famous book "Man is a Machine" that influenced future generations.
Man is a Machine, by [Far] La Metry, translated by Gu Shouguan, July 2011 edition of the Commercial Press
The book makes many heated arguments that the soul is just a "pale and feeble word" used to denote "the part of the body that can think," the brain. This organ has muscles that can be used to think, "just as there are muscles on the legs that can be used to walk." He sees the body as a "clock", "a machine that can operate on its own". Diderot, one of the most important philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment of his contemporaries, borrowed much from his Man as a Machine, and although the gentle and rational man was drawn to many of the radical ideas in the book, the implicit immorality of it disturbed him. Diderot later confirmed that to recognize that human beings are not so perfect machines is to understand the following creed: there is only one virtue, justice; there is only one responsibility, happiness; and finally: do not overestimate life, do not fear death."
La Metelli's views also inspired future generations, since man is a machine, can a machine also be a man?
From 1921 to 2018
Czech science fiction writer Karel Chapek created a play, Rossum's Universal Robots, and it was he, or rather his brother Joseph, who coined the word robot in reference to the Czech word "robota." The word means "hard labor" or "servitude" in Czech. This robot is indeed a slave to humans, and it is a product made by the industrial assembly line in the factory. The author's intention is self-evident, the so-called robot is the "mechanized person" under industrial civilization, it can be said to be the representative of the earliest generation of industrial robots, but its cold ruthlessness also symbolizes the gradual loss of humanity in industrialization.
"Russum's Universal Robot" became a sensation around the world and became a huge success. Despite Chapec's idea of exploring the consequences of human mechanization through the ultimate rebellion of robots, instead robots became trendsetters, inspiring fashion designers with their "dull, swollen, sculptural appearance." Many people have been inspired to start building a wide variety of humanoid robots. The tide of robots is unstoppable. One of the caused an uproar was the robot Eric, born in 1928, whose eyes were crooked, whose eyeballs were electric, and whose mouth had no teeth or lips. The chest and arms are armored, and sharp metal joints are visible at the knees", which gives the impression not of industrialization, but of a frightening sense of fear, "its face is motionless, like the monster in the movie Frankenstein".
Screenplay "Russum's Universal Robot", by Karel Chapek[Czech], July 2013 edition
In 2018, after three major version upgrades, Boston Dynamics showed the outside world an upgraded version of the humanoid robot Atlas, which has a head, torso and limbs like a human, and the "eyes" are two stereo sensors. And already has a certain degree of self-control. In its October 12 demo, it even mastered the extreme sport of parkour. The development of artificial intelligence technology has enabled robots to master learning skills in addition to autonomous movement. The gap between humans and robots seems to be getting smaller and smaller. The advent of the technological singularity of artificial intelligence proposed by Asimov seems to be getting closer and closer. But how far robots can go is still up to human will. But just as it happened when mankind announced that it would be freed from the domination of the Creator and become the master of its own destiny. In the face of the unpredictable problems that arise in the many possible futures of robots, people themselves may have to choose to remain silent.
The three laws of robotics
Isaac Asimov, the most important writer in the history of science fiction, famously proposed the "Three Laws of Robotics" in the novel "Circle":
1. Robots shall not harm humans or cause harm to humans by inaction. Unless the first law is violated, robots must obey human commands. Unless the first and second laws are violated, the robot must protect itself.
But then Asimov added a new law: the zeroth law.
Robots must not harm the human race as a whole, or cause harm to the human population as a whole by inaction.
Asimov's "Circle of Circles" is included in his collection of novels "I, Robot", which has been marketed for generations of science fiction fans, and Asimov has written a new "Introduction" for the book, and the subtitle of "Introduction" is "The Three Laws of Robotics". These three laws have also become one of the most classic quotes in science fiction, and the only thing that can be compared to it may be the ultimate answer to everything in the universe, "42".
Although the three laws seem to be perfect, they are full of loopholes. The definitions of "man" and "robot" in the three laws themselves are vague, and Louis Helm, acting director of the Institute of Machine Intelligence, pointed out that there is an inherently antagonistic and flawed ethical framework of obligations in the three laws, and the most obvious thing is that it reflects the complete dominance and dominance of robots, and its purpose is to maintain the social order of robots as slaves to human beings. Under this set of laws, humans and robots will never treat each other equally, which also means that robots like Doraemon that can become the true friends of human beings will never appear, but may appear the kind of supercomputer hal9000 that is "all for your own good", but its approach is not to kill humans, but to keep them in the absolute safety imposed.
Edit | Luo Dong;Li Yongbo;Wang Qing
Proofreading | Xue Jingning
Source: Beijing News