The virgin, the genius and the robot

It’s coincidental, but synchronous, that yesterday’s Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix occurred in the same 24-hour period as EH10. Environmentally the GP and EH10 are diametrically opposed. Yet governments compete to host a car race that’s ruinous to their credibility on global warming and climate change. Maybe their focus groups show that punters don’t, or can’t, connect the dots. It’s all stupid. Talking of stupid, though F1 holds itself out to be at the automotive technology’s cutting edge, three days ago the geniuses in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Racing team discovered their cars’ fuel tanks were 13 litres too small for the cars to complete the race without refuelling. Ho hum.
Talking of geniuses, as I wrote here I’ve long been captivated by robots; and I’ve admired the people who make them. Tonight’s the first Seder – the ceremonial dinner that starts the Jewish festival of Passover. An important element in the ceremony is Ma Nishtana, i.e. the asking of four key questions. Traditionally the youngest person present asks these questions. Tonight I’m not hosting or attending a Seder. I’ll be alone, and so the youngest person here. I won’t say, or sing, Ma Nishtana; but I’ll play this YouTube clip – courtesy of the geniuses in the Research and Development Institute for Intelligent Robotic Systems, Computer Science Department, The College of Management Academic Studies. COMAS is Israel’s leading academic college. This clip shows why. Happy Passover to you.

farmdoc's blog post number 492

When I was a lad, the magazine I loved best was Popular Mechanics. Of its articles I’d always jump first to those about robots. I don’t know why robots fascinated me. But fascinated I was. And still am. Maybe because robotics, uniquely, is at the interface of applied science and science fiction. The word robot was coined in the 1921 science fiction play R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots] by the Czech playwright Karel Capek (1890-1938). Robot comes from the Czech word robota meaning forced labour or serf. And the word robotics was first used in a 1942 short story by Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). Merriam-Webster’s definition of robot mentions several traits: looks like a human (i.e. anthropomorphic), performs various complex acts that a human performs, lacks human emotions, and is guided by automatic controls. I doubt all are necessary for a robot to be a robot. In this series of superb robot photographs on the Boston Globe’s ‘The Big Picture’ site, most but not all the robots look like humans. (Indeed some of the robots are better looking than some humans I’ve seen.) It looks to me like the more utilitarian their function (e.g. military robots) the less human they look. I’m no longer a lad, and I haven’t seen – let alone read – a copy of Popular Mechanics for almost 50 years. (I didn’t even know it’s still published. Evidently it is.) But robots still captivate me as much as they ever did.