profoundly hampered by their inability to learn in any significant way. (This failing has apparently led Toyota, after heavy investment in robotics, to consider replacing robots with humans on many production lines.) And without learning, simple common sense will lie beyond robots for a long time to come.
Indeed, despite years of startling advances and innumerable successes like the chess-playing Big Blue, computer science is still about as far as it ever was from building a machine with the learning abilities, linguistic competence, common sense or social skills of a 5-year-old child.
As with Internet bots, real-world robots will no doubt become increasingly useful. But they will probably also become increasingly frustrating to use as a result of tunnel design. In that regard, they may indeed seem antisocial, but not in the way of Terminator-like fantasies of robot armies that lay waste to human society.
Indeed, the thing that handicaps robots most is their lack of a social existence. For it is our social existence as humans that shapes how we speak, learn, think and develop common sense. All forms of artificial life (whether bugs or bots) will remain primarily a metaphor for - rather than a threat to - society, at least until they manage to enter a debate, sing in a choir, take a class, survive a committee meeting, join a union, pass a law, engineer a cartel or summon a constitutional convention.
These critical social mechanisms allow society to shape its future. It is through planned, collective action that society forestalls expected consequences (such as Y2K) and responds to unexpected events (such as epidemics).
THE FAILURE OF "6-D" VISION
Why does the threat of a cunning, replicating robot society look so close from one perspective, yet so distant from another? The difference lies in the well-known tendency of futurologists to count "1, 2, 3 ... a million." That is, once the first step on a path is taken, it's very easy to assume that all subsequent steps are trivial.
Several of the steps Joy asks us to take - the leap from genetic engineering to a "white plague"; from simulations to out-of-control nanotechnology; from replicating peptides to a "robot species" - are extremely large. And they are certainly not steps that will be taken without diversions, regulations or controls.
One of the lessons of Joy's article, then, is that the path to the future can look simple (and sometimes downright terrifying) if you look at it through what we call "6-D lenses." We coined this phrase having so often in our research hit up against upon such "de-" or "di-" words as demassification, decentralization, disintermediation, despacialization, disaggregation and demarketization in the canon of futurology.
If you take any one of these words in isolation, it's easy to follow their relentless logic to its evident conclusion. Because firms are getting smaller, for example, it's easy to assume that companies and other intermediaries are simply disintegrating into markets. And because communication is growing cheaper and more powerful, it's easy to believe in the "death of distance."
But things rarely work in such linear fashion. Other forces are often at work, such as those driving firms into larger and larger mergers to take advantage of social, rather than merely technological, networks. Similarly, even though communications technology has killed distance, people curiously can't stay away from the social hotbed of modern communications technology, Silicon Valley.
Importantly, these d-words indicate that the old ties that once bound communities, organizations and institutions are being picked apart by technologies. A simple, linear reading, then, suggests that these communities, organizations and institutions will now simply fall apart. A more complex reading, taking into account the multiple forces at work, offers another picture.
While many powerful national corporations have grown insignificant, some have transformed into more powerful transnational firms. While some forms of community may be dying, others, bolstered by technology, are growing stronger.
Technology and society are constantly forming and reforming new dynamic equilibriums with far-reaching implications. The
