> SOUTHERN INDIANA — Like most Americans I was proud when NASA’s rover, Curiosity, landed on the surface of the Red Planet on Aug. 5, 2012. Curiosity weighs more than a ton, is about the size of a small SUV, and is probably the world’s most expensive robot.

Unfortunately, Curiosity’s touchdown was upstaged by the ongoing London Olympic Games. On the day of the Mars landing there were hundreds of events including four distracting beach volleyball games. You would think that an interplanetary journey of more than 354 million miles would take precedence.

As much as I liked the idea of Curiosity, I also have to admit that it looked a little creepy. At first glance my wife Diane and I thought it resembled that adorable little trash collecting robot WALL-E in the 2008 Disney-Pixar animated film. But on closer examination, it appears to have a more sinister insectoid appearance. In addition to an elongated multi-legged cooty-like body, NASA chose to outfit it with a laser beam [death ray], presumably to vaporize rocks.

Most of my early experience with robots was with the Jetson’s robot maid Rosie; the “Lost in Space” robot, who warned Will Robinson of approaching danger; and “Robby the Robot,” the 1950s era automaton built by MGM Studios. Robbie was featured in many television shows of the era and several movies, most notably, “Forbidden Planet.”

Robots fall into that strange category of things that fascinate people, but at the same time scare them. I suppose it’s because they are basically objects that combine human and inhuman features, such as clowns, dolls and perhaps even computers, like HAL the sinister computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Czech playwright Karel Çapek first used the term “robot” [which means a forced laborer] in his 1920 play about an Englishman who produced and sold android servants. Even in this early conception, the robots ended up destroying all of humanity.

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov coined the term “Frankenstein complex” to denote our fear of robots. He believed that the fear grows stronger the more closely the artificial beings resemble real people. In 1970 Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori described the “Uncanny Valley” hypothesis, which holds that when robots very closely resemble humans, it engenders a feeling of revulsion. The “valley” refers to the sudden large decrease in the comfort level of humans that occurs as a robot’s resemblance to humans gets closer.

Even though Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics” explicitly states that a robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, every reader of his science fiction knows that laws are made to be broken. There just doesn’t seem to be any way to fully convince people that robots will not kill, replace or dominate them.

Just last Thursday one of the pioneers of modern robotics passed away at the age of 99. George C. Devol, who was born in Louisville, was the inventor of the famous robot arm, which became the prototype for industrial robots when it was adopted by General Motors in the 1960s. A few years ago I took a tour of an automobile plant assembly line and was surprised at the extent that industrial robots are being used for things such as welding, spray painting and assembly. It’s hard to argue that some people were not replaced by these robots.

Despite the fear that human-appearing robots apparently generate, there seems to be an associated compulsion to make them more and more human-like. Apple’s iPhone personal assistant Siri spurred other electronics manufacturers to try to give their smart phones human sounding voices too, as well as distinct personalities. NASA even hired social media experts to create a human sounding marscuriosity Twitter feed. Sunday Curiosity used its ChemCam laser system for the first time to pulverize a Martian rock named Coronation with 30 laser blasts. A tweet from that day reads: “Yes, I’ve got a laser beam attached to my head. I’m not ill tempered; I zapped a rock for science.” I for one am glad that Curiosity is so far away. Ill-tempered or not, I’m not sure I’d want any robot with a laser on its head scooting around downtown, especially one that was built by the lowest bidder.

Besides industry and space exploration, robotics have also made inroads in many other fields. With a price tag of more than $1.75 million, the hottest thing in health care today is the da Vinci robotic surgical system. It is being used across the country for a variety of urologic, gynecologic, cardiac and general surgery procedures. The da Vinci company describes it as “a sophisticated robotic platform designed to expand the surgeon’s capabilities and offer a minimally invasive option for major surgery.” As a patient all of this sounds great, although it only seems a step away from using cybernetic implants to expand our capabilities. In some ways this movement toward humans merging with technology has already started with surgically implanted stimulators, pacemakers and pumps, along with our ever present smart phones, wireless headsets and earpieces. All this begs perhaps a more important question, “Are robots becoming more human or are we becoming more machinelike?”

Engineer Brian Cooper is one of the fortunate people selected to operate the Curiosity rover. He was NASA’s first remote control rover driver. Cooper has worked on every rover sent to Mars so far and oversaw the development of the driver interface. At age 52 he is currently the oldest of the Mars Rover drivers, a select group of about 20 people worldwide. You can practice your own Mars rover driving skills at www.marsquestonline.org/coolstuff/drivearover/index.html.

When you think about it, Curiosity combines the features of perhaps the two greatest toys for boys ever: the remote control car and the flashy toy robot that even shoots out a red laser beam. To paraphrase the comments comedian Jerry Seinfeld once made about the lunar rover. There is probably no more male idea in the history of the Universe, than why don’t we fly up to Mars, drive around a radio control car, and blast rocks with a laser? “That is the total essence of male thinking right there.”

    

Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com. Checkout his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at www.planetterry.wordpress.com.