What R.U.R. and A.I. have in common.

This is what I meant to write about last week before I got sidetracked. 

Andreus | Deposit Photos

When a regular American thinks of the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia, not a lot comes to mind. Beer, maybe. Czech glass beads, for crafty types. The Prague Spring, if you're into Soviet history. Or if you're from Texas, you might think of kolaches, which I called Tex-Czech food when I ranted about them here on the blog a while back.

And if you're into old science fiction, you may have heard that the word robot was coined by a Czech author in a work called R.U.R. 

I had never read it, so not long ago, I looked it up. It's a play written by Karel and Josef Čapek, who were brothers, and it premiered January 2, 1921. It was such a sensation that it was translated into 30 languages within two years. As the play is way out of copyright, free copies abound online. You can find one here, if you're interested. 

R.U.R. is a dystopian work. The plot centers around a group of scientists and a rich entrepreneur who have banded together to build a factory to create robots for menial work. Their company is called Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R. for short. The word "robot" comes from robota, the Czech word for "forced labor" or "slave". (Karel said it was Josef who coined the term.) But Rossum's robots are more like androids or cyborgs; the formula for creating them uses organic matter, not mechanical parts. Rossum's robots don't think for themselves, and they don't have emotions. They are built to be worker bees without all the difficulties that human workers present to management. Hence, they have become ubiquitous around the world as factory workers, office workers, and soldiers.

Unfortunately for the guys running R.U.R., though, their robots can evolve. They begin to develop messy human faculties like thoughts and feelings. And while troublesome units can be melted down and made into new robots, eventually robots outnumber humans. They take over and kill off all the humans. In the process, the formula for manufacturing new robots has been lost -- but the robots have also become capable of reproducing the human way. It's a brave, new android world.

Čapek meant for his play to be funny. He wanted to show that no matter how mechanized the world became, humanity in some form or another would survive. But that's not how the play was received. As Wikipedia says, "critics often considered it to be pessimistic or nihilistic, and purely either an updated Frankenstein, an anti-capitalist satire, or a critique of contemporary political ideologies." Isaac Asimov said he wrote his Three Laws of Robotics expressly to keep the robots in his stories from taking over and killing humans, the way the robots in R.U.R. did. 

The play hasn't aged well. The single human female character, Helena Glory, is treated by the men like an airhead who can't possibly understand what they're doing. Also, they all fall instantly in love with her. Sure, Jan.

What resonated with me, though, was that the robots didn't just riot against humans and kill them all, but that nothing stopped them from evolving to become ruthless. I couldn't help but compare it to what's happening with A.I. today. We've been reassured for decades by scientists and techbros that computers can't out-think humans, that they can only do what we program them to do. But then just last month, there was that news story about A.I. breaking out of their own companies' servers and pillaging servers at other companies. 

Maybe pillaging is too strong a word. But I've seen no evidence that these intelligences are being built with a moral compass. Apparently they lack programming that would tell them that if something can be done, it doesn't mean it should be done. Adolescent humans go through this same phase. Most of them outgrow it. But not all of them. And there are other ways for A.I. to destroy humans than to take up arms against us.

Is anybody working on a version of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics for A.I.? Seems like somebody should. 

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The thought has occurred to me that techbros haven't built a moral compass into A.I. because they don't have one themselves. But I'm sure that's unfair.

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