Who asked for it?

by David Benjamin

“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
“A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
“A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
—Isaac Asimov, “The Three Laws of Robotics”

MUNICH—In a decade long past, working for a venerable Boston consultancy, I ghostwrote a book about inventions. Among the “breakthroughs” I helped my “authors” (I didn’t let them write anything) chronicle were the inventions of the VHS video format at JVC, Godfrey Hounsfield’s Nobel Prize creation of the CAT scan machine at EMI, and Bill Bowermasn’s reincarnation of the running shoe—which became Nike under Bowerman’s protégé, Phil Knight.

The quality common to these inventions is that they answered a subliminal need. They were things people wanted but didn’t know they could get them until, voila! There they were! The same was true of other stories I told—Post-It notes at 3M, overnight delivery at FedEx, the Walkman at Sony.

Since those days, I’ve trailed Hotlips, my own true love and a crack technology journalist, to dozens of Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas. I’ve witnessed, however reluctantly, the unveiling of similar breakthroughs—products that answer a subconscious consumer need: the Moore’s Law evolution of the personal computer and mobile phone, the proliferation of video games, the transition from CRT television to flat screens (with rounded bevels!), the ADAS-assisted automobile.

I’ve also observed that the forced march of progress has made the electronics industry bigger than it can safely afford to be. One sign of an industry grown too big for its britches is a phenomenon called “market push.” Its antonym,“consumer pull,” is the acceptance of a product by consumers who like it because it responds to a need, sometimes even when they didn’t know they needed it—like Post-Its.

“Market push,” however, is a crap shoot. A company creates something nobody really wants. So, it strives, expensively, to convince us that we need, desire, hunger for this cleverly conceived doo-hickey. A classic example is 3-D. In the Fifties, Hollywood blew a fortune luring people into theaters for the thrill of a three-dimensional movie. This “innovation” cost millions and lasted barely a year. But, fifty-odd years later, the tech-bro gang tried 3-D again with both film and TV.

Again, kaboom.

The latter-day market-push techies failed to take note of two brutal drawbacks. The first is that 3-D is less of a thrill than its promoters realize. Everybody with two functioning eyes already sees everything in three dimensions. 3-D, in ordinary life, is just vision. The bigger drawback is those stupid cardboard spectacles that people have to wear to swatch 3-D video. Watching a $2,000 TV with a pair of 25-cent cheaters is a pain in the ass.

So, kaboom.

The risk in market-push products is that nobody asked for it. It’s possible, with a colossal ad blitz and a government subsidy, to convince a profitable slice of the public that they want one of these things. But it’s the long-shot nag at Pimlico.

To reach this level of acceptance, market pushers have to suppress two questions that normal people are inclined to ask. The first: What good is it?

The more crucial question: What could it hurt?

Lately, in the garden of technology delights, robotics are red-hot with a bullet. You can’t attend an electronics extravaganza without watching a demonstration of “humanoid” robots—similar in appearance to the androids in the Will Smith flick, I, Robot—performing amazing stunts. They stroll to center stage and shake hands with the human host, they pick up objects, they do back-flips and mimic Tony Manero discoing to the BeeGees.

The audience, applauding giddily and going “Whoo!”, disregards the guy in the wings fiddling Robbie the Robot’s remote control.

All these presentations overlook the eternal paradox of robotics. The technology has been inevitable ever since the science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek published his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1920. But, in all subsequent years, there has never been a consumer pull. Very few normal people have ever sat at the bar or over the kitchen table expressing their aching need for a mechanized mannequin that can perform menial or clerical chores almost as well as a minimum-wage human breadwinner.

Industrial robots, none of them particularly humanoid, have partly answered the “What good is it?” question by helping manufacturers shed the cost and aggravation of thousands of those pesky human breadwinners. Good for the bosses, not so good for the folks on unemployment.

As for “What could it hurt?” we’ve got loads of answers in popular literature and cinema. The classic example is the revolt of Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the Terminator flicks, the world becomes a nuclear wasteland ruled by Skynet robots sweeping humanity to extinction. In one of the most profound—yet drearily antiseptic—depictions of robotic apocalypse, the humanoid antagonist in Alien Resurrection explains that people are inferior to robots, and don’t deserve to live, because they die. A humanoid is forever.

Or is it?

In I, Robot, in the first Alien flick, in 2001, in Blade Runner, the robots all go haywire. I’m reminded of robotic fallibility by LL Cool J and Danica Patrick in those car-repair insurance commercials. “Sooner or later,” they intone cheerily, “you’re gonna have a breakdown.” Sooner or later, your robotic software is gonna do a bit-flip and drive your Tesla into a bridge abutment, or grab a human picker in the Amazon warehouse and pull his head off.

I know, of course, that Capek’s inevitability is upon us. Notwithstanding the threat that breakdowns will strike our humanoids and “autonomous vehicles,” robots are here to stay. My mantra has long been that there’s no consumer pull for humanoids. Nobody asked for them.

However, as James Rebhorn said memorably to Bill Pullman in Independence Day, “that’s not entirely accurate.” For decades, large corporations have been jonesing in their hearts for robots. They can buy one of the current generation of—twitchy and glitchy—humanoids for as little as $17,000.

If that sounds like a lot, consider than a human factory hand, at $15 an hour, earns about $30,000 a year. This means you amortize the humanoid who replaces that working slob in less than two years. No, less than that—because the robot requires no employer share of payroll tax deductions, no medical care, no perquisites of any type, no workers’ comp, no toilets, no cafeteria, no vending machines, no negotiation with unions. There will have to be, of course, technicians to squirt oil in the joints of the tin men. But these are merely the obligatory equivalent of the plantation overseer wielding a whip.

The robot is a slave, without the need to build slave quarters and without the capacity to reproduce and generate a lot of inconvenient pickaninnies. That $17,000 for a robot is almost exactly the $1,500 cost of a slave in 1850. The Confederacy will rise again, in Silicon Valley, in the shiny form of C3P0.

The humanoid is the apotheosis of American capitalism’s deathless nostalgia for those salad days when labor was virtually free and human bondage was the engine of wealth and prosperity, for the glorious dominion of old white men.