The Robot in Your Pocket

A robot is defined as “a mechanical or virtual artificial agent, usually an electromechanical machine that is guided by a computer program or electronic circuitry, and thus a type of an embedded system.”

People worry about a lot of things. They worry about being taken over by bacteria and dying of an infection. They worry about an invasion by less-than-friendly aliens. They worry that someday in the future robots will take over the human race.

Let’s start by discussing bacteria.

People don’t appreciate that, in a sense, we are taken over by bacteria from the moment we are born. For every human cell in our body, there are more than one thousand bacteria on our teeth, filling our guts, all over our skin. They control our health, well-being and resistance to infection (yes!). And for the most part, they are benign.

When virulent Streptococcus pyogenes do launch an attack, they might even kill you. But when you die, the bacteria die as well. They can’t survive in the absence of a living human. Does that matter to them, you might ask. Well that’s a human question. Bacteria see the world through a different prism. They have logic, but it’s not human logic.

We don’t really know whether aliens are here already. We don’t know whether aliens are, at all. But if they are, we might guess they don’t have two eyes and a nose. Yitz, the alien from Mars, for example, has seven eyes, no nose, a funny head and no body to speak of. And he does have a mind of his own.

And now, to robots. The robots we are afraid of are the ones we see in the movies. Their appearance is almost human. They are based on stories written by Isaac Asimov. He didn’t invent the word ‘robot’ but perhaps he might be regarded as the grandfather of the genre.

We are afraid of robots making diabolical plans to take over mankind. We assume, however that they would behave in a more or less logical (our logic) way. Again, there is no reason to assume that robots should do so. Even though they were created by mankind.

My friend, Hagai Cohen, actually met Isaac Asimov. They were co-urinators in 1969. Hagai wrote a book about their encounter of the urinating kind. He remembers asking Asimov the following: “Why do you, in your books make the robots look human? Intelligent boxes will do the job as well as human robots.”

Asimov is reported to have answered,

“I know that Mr. Cohen. Frankly, it makes a better story.”

Which brings me to my point. We won’t be taken over by robots.

That’s because we have already been taken over. They don’t look like humans. They don’t think like humans. And yes, Hagai Cohen, they are intelligent boxes.

The robots are in our pockets. The smartphones we consult every two minutes.

And yes, they already control our lives.

Our ‘pocket robots’ fit the definition back on page one. And they sure do control our lives. My friend, smartphone expert Yael Man Shahar is convinced that we have become their slaves. Their willing, obedient slaves.

Yael has found that we consult our pocket robots practically every minute we are awake. We experience phantom vibrations. We go into withdrawal and suffer anxiety when they are removed from our immediate surroundings.

So if you want to be afraid of robots taking over the world, then you have just cause. There’s a robot in your pocket. It looks nothing like a human. It doesn’t think like a human. But slowly, inorexably, it is taking over our lives. And ironically enough, we are eagerly succumbing to its siren song.