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( Fig. 17.9 ). Steven Spielberg directed the movie AI based on the short story
“Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldis ( Fig. 17.10 ). In the movie,
David is a new, advanced type of humanoid robot designed to look like a human
child and programmed to love its owners. The movie I, Robot , produced in 2004,
was loosely based on the characters of Asimov's robot stories. The date is 2035
and humanoid robots are in widespread use ( Fig. 17.11 ). They are programmed
with Asimov's Three Laws, supplemented by a fourth, Zeroth Law, introduced
by Asimov in his later novels that joined up his robot stories to his famous
Foundation series.
Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity
to come to harm. 19
Fig. 17.9. Robot Johnny 5 from the 1986
movie Short Circuit directed by John
Badham.
The movie features Susan Calvin, played by Bridget Moynahan as the chief
robo-psychologist at U.S. Robotics, and Will Smith as Detective Del Spooner
brought in to investigate the death of Dr. Alfred Lanning, chief roboticist and
cofounder of U.S. Robotics. The crux of the plot concerns the central super-
computer that oversees all of U.S. Robotics operations, which has come to the
conclusion that humans are too self-destructive to be trusted with the future
of humanity. It consequently interprets the Zeroth Law as giving robots the
right to overrule the First Law and kill humans if it is for the greater good of
humanity.
Two recent science fiction novels have taken up the theme of intelligent
robots in new ways. A new type of “robot rebellion” scenario is portrayed in
the 2011 novel Robopocalypse by Daniel Wilson. The novel is set in the not too
distant future when all our cars, houses, and devices are networked and possess
some degree of intelligence. Controlled by a massively powerful artificial intel-
ligence (AI) machine called Archos, the robots rebel and bring the human race
to near annihilation. Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez, published in 2012, weaves an
exciting techno-thriller around the possibilities of unmanned drones equipped
with AI and autonomy - the kill decision of the title. Although both these nov-
els contain many plausible - and scary - extrapolations of current technologies,
it is safe to say that we are still far from creating the genuinely sentient human-
oid robots so beloved of science fiction writers ( Fig. 17.12 ).
Fig. 17.10. A HoverCopter and other
vehicles from Steven Spielberg's 2001
movie AI .
Philip K. Dick and the nature of reality
Questions about memory and machine intelligence, together with the
question of who is human and who is only masquerading as a human, are the
major themes in the stories of Philip K. Dick ( B.17.12 ). He constantly questions
whether reality is only a fiction and an intense feeling of paranoia pervades
almost all of his stories ( Fig. 17.13 ).
“Impostor,” a short story from 1953, explores an alien invasion scenario in
which humans have been replaced by androids - humanoid robots with real-
istic flesh and hair. Spence Olham, a worker on a military research project, is
arrested on suspicion of having been replaced by an android. Olham manages
to escape by telling his captors that he is indeed a robot and is programmed
to explode. He then sets out to prove his innocence and finds a crashed alien
spaceship in the woods close by his home. On examining the wreckage, Olham
Fig. 17.11. Photograph of the rogue NS-5
robot in the 2004 movie I, Robot , directed
by Alex Proyas. The plot was loosely
based on Isaac Asimov's robot stories
and revolved around Asimov's Laws of
Robotics.
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