Can robots be developed in grace-loving machines?

No one could tell exactly when the robots arrived. During the break they appeared to have smuggled into campus without any official announcements, explanations or warnings. There were a few dozen in total: six-wheeled ice box-sized boxes on top of the yellow flags for visibility. They navigated the campus sidewalks using cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors. They were there looking for students, transporting shipments ordered through a college food service app, but everyone I worked on campus had a few anecdotes about the first encounter.

These stories, at least initially, were noticed with amusement or performative exasperation. Several friends complained that the machines made use of the roads for free, but did not know the social rules: they refused to give in to pedestrians and traveled slowly on the passing lane, protecting traffic. One morning a friend of mine, an assistant monitor who was late for his class, threw a bicycle bot behind a bot with the intention of getting him off the road, but he continued on his route, indifferent. Another friend found a bot trapped in a bicycle parking lot. He was heavy, and had to ask for help from the passage to free him. “Luckily it was just a bike parking lot,” he said. “Wait until you hit the bikes and start moving cars.”

Among the students, the only problem was excessive love. Bots were often handed out at the time of delivery because students insisted on taking selfies with machines outside the bedroom or chatting with them. The robots had minimal ability to speak: send greetings and instructions and say “Thank you, have a good day!” as he left, and yet it was enough to make many people love him as social beings. Bots often returned to the stations with notes: Hello, robot! and We love you! Memes proliferated on the social media pages of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A student wore a bot with a hat and scarf, took a picture and created a profile in a dating app. His name was Onezerozerooneoneone, he was 18 years old. Occupation: childbirth. Orientation: Asexual robot.

At that time autonomous machines were being created all over the country. Food stores used them to patrol the corridors to look for spills and debris. Walmart introduced them to its supercenters to track unsold items. A New York Times the story reported that many of these robots were christened with nicknames by their colleagues and given them distinctive names. One threw at a birthday party where, among other gifts, he was given a can of WD-40 lubricant. The article presented these anecdotes in a rigorous way, mostly as cases of harmless anthropomorphism, but the same instinct already guided public policy. In 2017, the European Parliament proposed that robots be considered an “electronic person,” arguing that some forms of AI had become sophisticated enough to be considered a responsible agent. It was a legal distinction made in the context of the law of responsibility, even though language seemed to call it the ancient animistic cosmology, where all inanimate types (trees and rocks, pipes, and pots) were considered human beings.

It made me think of the opening of a 1967 poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” by Richard Brautigan:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cyber meadow
where mammals and computers
living together
programming harmony
like clean water
touching the clear sky.

Brautigan wrote these lines in the summer of love, from the heart of the San Francisco counterculture, while he was a poet at the California Institute of Technology headquarters. The stanzas following the poem explored the enchanted landscape of “cyber forests” and flower-like computers, digital technologies that unite us with “our mammalian siblings” where they achieve true equality of being humans, robots, and beasts. The work is reminiscent of a particular subgenre of West Coast utopianism, reminiscent of the movement back to land and Stewart Brand. Whole Land Catalog, He reorganized the tools of the American industrial complex to make the world more equitable and ecologically sustainable. Technology represents a return to a more primitive age — a pre-modern and perhaps pre-Christian era in history when humans lived in harmony with nature and the inanimate were enchanted with life.

Echoes of this dream can still be found in conversations about technology. People like MIT’s David Rose repeat that they think the Internet of Things will soon “enchant” everyday objects, filling door handles, thermostats, refrigerators, and cars with sensitivity and intelligence. It can be found in the work of post-human theorists like Jane Bennett, who imagines digital technologies that reconfigure modern understanding of “dead matter” and restore an ancient worldview. it’s amazing for us. “

“I like to think” begins each stanza of Brautigan’s poem, each refrain that reads as a poetic device rather than as a mystical call. This view of the future may be another unwanted way, but it is compelling because of its historical symmetry. It seems right that we need to reclaim the enchanted world where technology itself destroyed technology. Perhaps the forces that facilitated the exile from Eden will one day revive our garden with digital life. Maybe it’s the only way.