Got Your Robots

If you are a robot pooh, pooher, think again. Consider your car, your home appliances, your phone; it goes on and on. These are all roboticized machines. If you don't believe me, take a look at your dashboard and know that it tells you when you need an oil change or have a tire air problem. Then there's your washing machine that performs the programs you punch in. It's automatic, and what else is that but a robot of a kind that does the work, but has no semblance of arms or legs. Even R2D2, a film robot, doesn't have legs! While the word "robot" was introduced by a Czech playwright in 1920, it's meaning is not just machines that look and do as humans, but also ones that perform tasks remotely. Ergo our humble washers and stoves as examples. We "tell" our machines what to do and how, and then we turn away trustingly, and go on about our business. As to our robots, like anything else we own, we expect them to complete what we want them to do, and no less or more. But a machine, like a person, sometimes breaks down and can't, or won't do, what it's directed to do. And that, sadly, is what happens when crashes harming humans, take place. Unlike Hal of sci-fi film, robots are not able to change what they are programmed to play out. They do, invariably, unless broken, what they are programmed to do and hopefully, those who use machines that are potentially dangerous, understand them thoroughly. Transportation crashes are the worst and the immediate investigations do not always find "human error" as the fault. The more complicated the robot, the more difficult it is for we weaker humans to understand. It's that simple. When I first started learning how to use a computer decades ago, I felt overwhelmed until I saw how very simple it really was, if you took small steps at a time to become familiar with the processes. It was just like any other human learning such as  reading or walking or driving. It takes time and patience. But being human, we, while the machine is all set to go, we may not be. Our minds are wonderful and contain potentials we can't even predict, but we are not as "smart" as computers that have gargantuan memories far bigger than ours can ever be. They do not forget. What we have over computers, is our senses. Our senses are built in, and if robots are deemed to "have' them, they have to be implanted first as "reactions" to their data, one supposes. A robot is a machine that can't think creatively, using similar human senses, which form the apex of  human intelligence. Some robots are being developed to "think", but none have the combination of sense and feeling and mores that make them human-like entirely. Robot choices are not based on feelings, as ours are. Your car, if roboticized and in proper working order,  will do exactly as it has been told, and recent studies show the choices it makes, can sometimes have the potential of disaster. The more trust in the robot, the higher, the risk. A recent air tragedy is thought to be a miscommunication between robotic devices and human interaction. The humans were not in error. Nor was the robot, but the two interactions did not mesh. I hope that somehow, robots will never be entirely trusted, and that always, we retain a fail-safe: the importance of being in human control of machines and never the reverse.