Slave to the Machine

As odd as it sounds, in the future we may become robots for machines. In fact, perhaps that phenomenon has already started to happen. Consider our changing relationship with maps.

Something very interesting has happened to the map recently, during the course of our own lives. When the medium of the map was transferred from paper to software, the map gained the ability to speak to us, to give us commands. With Google Maps or an in-dash GPS system, we no longer have to look at a map and plot out a route for ourselves; the map assumes that work. We become the actuators of the map’s instructions: the assistants who, on the software’s command, turn the wheel. You might even say that our role becomes that of a robotic apparatus controlled by the medium.

We will, of course, use robots to train dogs.  Skinner did that more than 70 years ago, and we will perfect the form in the not-too-distant future.

But what of the dogs themselves?  Will a large section of the populace abandon dogs altogether in exchange for their robotic analogs?

And if that happens, will there be a special society to prevent robot cruelty?

At a 2013 robotics conference the MIT researcher Kate Darling invited attendees to play with animatronic toy dinosaurs called Pleos, which are about the size of a Chihuahua. The participants were told to name their robots and interact with them. They quickly learned that their Pleos could communicate: The dinos made it clear through gestures and facial expressions that they liked to be petted and didn’t like to be picked up by the tail. After an hour, Darling gave the participants a break. When they returned, she handed out knives and hatchets and asked them to torture and dismember their Pleos.

Darling was ready for a bit of resistance, but she was surprised by the group’s uniform refusal to harm the robots. Some participants went as far as shielding the Pleos with their bodies so that no one could hurt them. “We respond to social cues from these lifelike machines,” she concluded in a 2013 lecture, “even if we know that they’re not real.”