Decades before Karel Čapek coined the word "robot" in 1920, Americans and Europeans already dreamed of mechanical workers. Actually, they weren’t just dreaming, as Taylor Evans, of UC Riverside has found. The image for today's podcast is from an American patent, granted in 1868, for a man-shaped "steam carriage."
Does it matter that, a little more than two years after the end of slavery, the head of the mechanical man in the drawing looks like white people's ideas of an African-American (not just in its features, but in the minstrel-show hat)?
Tom Williams, a designer, roboticist and cognitive scientist, argues that it matters a great deal. His argument: You to know need the (often grim) history that shaped people's imaginings of robots. Because those imaginings shaped robotics today.
That's why our 21st century conversation began with a discussion of Evans' work about 19th-century fantasies of machine labor.
But Williams and his students don't live in the past. They're engineers, who want to build robots. They just want robots that don’t quietly reinforce injustices that their designers want to end. So he and his colleagues roam through history, philosophy, ethics and other fields. This is why my talk with Williams ranged from Black feminism to the logistics of hospital robots, from robots in police work to what happens when designers don't share the values of the people they're making robots for.
I guess if you’re an “anti-woke” type, Williams is just what you fear about academia. But if you keep an open mind, I think you’ll see why it's important for us civilians to keep an eye on the fundamental questions Williams and colleagues work on, beyond “what will this robot do?” Questions like Why was this built? Who was it built to serve? What ideas about people does this reinforce? How can we make sure it doesn't go wrong?
(As ever, please remember that the transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors. Please let me know about any you find.)
There Is No Apolitical Robot