Book Review: Readings

Robo sapiens

MIT Press, 240 pp., $29.95

Last year a customer in a San Francisco Sony store grabbed an Aibo robot dog and proceeded to smash it to smithereens. No explanation was given for this act, but it illustrates the paradoxical feelings many people have about robots. They are fascinating -- but scary. And now that a variety of robots like Aibo are being manufactured as consumer items, this subterfuge is bound to become a bigger issue. The photographs in Robo sapiens are shot in classic National Geographic style, which isn't surprising because the photographer, Peter Menzel, has taken numerous photographs for that magazine. In fact, Robo sapiens could be described as three or four National Geographic special issues devoted to robotics. And true to the National Geographic style, robots of all shapes and sizes are photographed as if they were aboriginal tribesmen from Pago Pago staring at us from the glossy colored pages with unblinking camera-eyes.

Robo sapiens, with its terse yet informative text by Faith D'Aluisio, provides a fairly comprehensive briefing about the exciting world of contemporary robotics. The field of robotics, it would seem, has no middle ground, and consists of a parade of eccentric characters that are often almost as bizarre as the robots they make, and who make off-the-cuff statements like, "One day robots are going to take over, dontcha know?" All of which is very interesting but begs the question: Why should robots -- even intelligent ones -- necessarily be humanoid? Why not superintelligent spider bots? Or scorpion bots? Or even snake bots?

Robo sapiens devotes an entire chapter to a robot bestiary of sorts that was spawned by the Poly-PEDAL (Performance Energetics Dynamics of Animal Locomotion) laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. Roboticists from all over the planet converge on the laboratory for the latest discoveries involving the reverse engineering of how various animals move their limbs so that they can be outfitted to their own projects.

For example, Poly-PEDAL's own ingenious piece of machinery is called the Mecho-Gecko, which uses the principles of "spring-mass systems" found in all two- and four-footed creatures; it can propel itself up and down walls and ceilings. In addition to geckos, cockroaches have appealed to the imaginations of many roboticists (would you believe that there are 21 muscles in a cockroach's knee?), and there are several types of cockroach bots featured in Robo sapiens. Of the cockroach bots, the most impressive is the truly magnificent Robot III modeled on the death-head cockroach and constructed from "pneumatic tubing and high-grade aluminum alloy." The inventors are sticklers for verisimilitude, and so Robot III looks and moves like a real cockroach with the exception that it is about 17 times as big.

Perhaps such cockroach bots will someday be sold in stores on the shelf next to Aibo. And also next to Aibo there may be Stepford wives. According to the online geek-zine Slashdot, Stepford wives are just around the corner: "Prototypes of sex bots already exist in Japan ... within twenty-five years, programmable, digital sex bots will be in many, if not most, American homes and apartments." But these sex bots are not to be found in Robo sapiens, although there is a brief mention of "a $7,000 life-sized sex doll called 'rarebot' that was selling like hotcakes." Menzel and D'Aluisio tracked it down but discovered it was not really a robot at all but a jerry-rigged contraption built by an unemployed prosthetics designer. But the "rarebot" doesn't seem to match the prototypes mentioned by Slashdot. Maybe Menzel and D'Aluisio didn't dig deep enough to locate the clandestine laboratories where these sex bots are being developed.

Will robots be our boon or our bane? Robo sapiens doesn't offer any easy answers. But it is the robot book to be reckoned with by all future robot books. So don't smash that Aibo. Read Robo sapiens instead for a penetrating glimpse into the robotic shape of things to come.