Dumb Science Fiction Part 1: Robots

 I say this only because I'm a serious fan of the genre: A lot of science fiction is just dumb as hell. 

I've got a long list if impossible or impractical technologies and tropes that I see again and again in science fiction, to the point that these dumb ideas aren't some rare aberration in the genre, but defining characteristics. The list is pretty long. Human-like aliens. Time travel. Faster than light travel. Settlements on biologically active alien worlds. Most teleportation. Telepathy, telekinesis, and other psychic phenomena. My subject for today's rant?

Robots. 

First, robots should be a science fiction success story.  Predicted over a century ago, they've been integrated into every aspect of our lives. They are in our homes, our workplaces, our grocery stores, and our driveways. A robot is simply a machine capable of carrying out a series of complex actions automatically. A drive through carwash is a robot (or series of robots working together). Your Roomba is a robot. My wife's car is part robot. It can adjust its speed automatically based on sensors detecting the speed of the car in front of it. If she strays over a yellow line, the car will automatically nudge itself back between the lines. This sort of automated task that can be done without human guidance beyond the initial programming, and repeated again and again, is the defining quality of a robot. 

Of course, not everyone agrees with this definition. Webster's has "device that automatically performs complicated tasks" as it's second definition. The first definition is "a machine that resembles a living creature." This is the legacy of science fiction. A century ago, scientists had visions of automated machines doing labor. Writers heard this idea, and since the main thing they knew about labor was that it was performed by humans, they imagined these machines doing human labor as naturally looking like humans themselves. They'd need eyes, ears, mouths, hands, legs, and all the other natural tools of humans. I've got a lot of appreciation for old science fiction and their visions of artificial men. They were working in a realm of pure ideas, with no actual first hand experience with robots. 

But, it's one thing to write about the artificial men of the future in 1920. To still be writing about them in 2020 requires an almost willful blindness to the actual history of robots. We've been interacting with Automated Tellers since the 70s. Factories have had robots building everything including other robots just a long. We've been exploring Mars via robot for decades. None of these robots look like us. 

In science fiction, you still see humanoid robots who have jobs driving your car or cleaning your house or solving crimes. And robots actually do these jobs, but there is zero reason to build a fake human to perform these functions. It all comes down to engineering. A good machine is a machine has only the parts required to function properly, and nothing more. A human body is an embarrassing collection of utterly unnecessary parts for most tasks. I need my hands to type. My legs, meanwhile, are just useless meat while I'm working on this post, consuming calories just to stay alive, on standby until I need them for something else. If you were to build a typing robot, why give it legs? 

Of course, typing is just a method for translating thoughts to words. Why bother even building a robot with fingers to accomplish that goal? If I want to send a text but my hands are full, I don't need to speak to a humanoid robot that's going to use it's artificial fingers to type the message for me. My phone will just translate my spoken words into written language and send the message. 

Fifty years ago, if I were a science fiction author imagining a robot replacement for a radio DJ, I might have plausibly imagined a mechanical man who fingered through albums, pulled records from sleeves, and manually placed them onto turntables. Even though, if I'd walked into any diner, I could have seen a jukebox performing all these actions without resembling a human being at all. Today, the machine that serves the same function doesn't even require moving parts. I just tell my smart speaker to play something I might like, and the music plays. 

Building humanlike robots as some sort of all general purpose extra human is a terrible engineering solution for nearly any imaginable task. Sadly, we're never going to pal around with Bender, Data, and Optimus Prime.

Except, now that I've argued how dumb the idea is, there are some reasons we might still have robotic best friends in the future. The first, most obvious path to their adoption is that children play with dolls, and dolls that talk and move and replicate human functions like feeding and even pooping are valuable commodities. Especially if we face future pandemics, and parents come to fear that their children interacting with other children is a death sentence, you could find a market for dolls that exist to be your child's best friend. And, it's possible that children who socialize with lifelike dolls grow into adults who still desire the company of lifelike dolls. 

Which tiptoes toward the uncomfortable reality that the industry where people are putting the most effort into building lifelike human replicas is probably the sex industry. Bender might not be a plausible robot, but Futurama might yet be right about humans having romantic relationships with mass produced celebrity replicas. 

And, as long as we're going to be accepting that some people might enjoy the company of robots, there's also the sad truth that we might build robots to be companions for people that other people don't want to spend a lot of time with, like the elderly. 

Finally, I'm sure someone has already thought of one more exception, which is that just about everyday there's some news story about a robot being built so life like it can have a career as an actor or as a receptionist in an office building. Don't be fooled. No one is building robots to be actors. Why film a robot to project an image onscreen when you can just create the same image on screen digitally? No one is really needing a robot for a receptionist, either, any more than you need a humanoid robot sitting at a kiosk inside a bank to help you withdraw money from your account. The job of a robot actor or robot receptionist isn't acting or recepting, it's hoodwinking. It's something flashy that gets a company into the news and gets investors' excited about putting their money into a company building the future. 

There. I've made my case. Filling your science fiction with robots is dumb. Glad that's off my chest, and looking forward to humanoid robots no longer appearing in science fiction starting tomorrow! 

PS: Before anyone points this out, yes, indeed, there are humanoid robots in some of my science fiction. What can I say? If I were immune to the appeal of dumb ideas, I wouldn't have decided to make a living as a writer in the first place!