Robo-Future

For most of the 20th century, a single “creature” has figured prominently in the ongoing tale of the future: the robot. Sometimes humanoid, sometimes charming, sometimes menacing, always tireless and intelligent, the robot is often the mechanical reflection of human desires, including the unending quest to be liberated from exhausting and demeaning labor. The word robot, which comes from the Slavic word for “work,” was first used by Czech playwright Karel Capek in his expressionistic play R.U.R. (1921; translated 1923). R.U.R., which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots, is about an army of human-shaped, soulless robots that today might be called clones or androids. In the vision of the mad scientist Rossum, the robots will solve humanity's problems: “There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everyone will live to perfect himself.” The robots eventually acquire all of the knowledge and innate viciousness of their masters, take over the world, and eradicate humanity. The reality, of course, is that robots are far from taking over the tasks of the world's low-skilled labor. In a best-selling 1982 book, Megatrends, forecaster John Naisbitt predicted that a veritable army of robots would replace low-skilled American workers by 2000—something that obviously has not happened. Although the widespread deployment of industrial robots has radically altered the factory floor in some industries, such as automobile manufacturing, these machines have yet to emerge as a replacement for human workers in most areas of the economy, especially in the booming service industries. There is, however, a technology that has emerged as the central tool in almost every profession and work environment today: computers. And unlike robots, which were common in speculative fiction and serious future forecasting for decades, the computer arrived with sudden, unanticipated impact and has tremendous, still-unknown consequences. Many predictions that were made in the past about computers, furthermore, have proved staggeringly inaccurate. The first computers, such as the 1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), filled entire rooms, and futurists simply extrapolated upward in size. Engineer Howard Aiken, who helped develop some of the first computing devices in the 1940s, saw no need for mass production of computers, stating the United States would require only four or five electronic digital computers for all of the nation's computing needs. In 1948 Thomas Watson, president of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), made a now-famous comment, reportedly claiming that there was a total world market for “maybe five” computers. Almost no one envisioned the miniaturization of computer circuitry, made possible by the 1948 invention of the transistor. Even after its invention, the market for computers was not anticipated. In 1956, when there were about 1,000 computers in existence, Although science-fiction writers occasionally equipped their heroes with handy devices that somehow combined the capabilities of calculators, radios, telephones, typewriters, and other available technologies, no one really predicted the emergence and extraordinarily rapid development of the personal computer. Even when the possibility seemed more close at hand, there were skeptics within the scientific community.