What Is a Robot?

"What Is a Robot? (The question is more complicated than it seems.)" By Adrienne LaFrance. The Atlantic on line, 22 March 2016.[1]

A well-researched and fairly detailed examination of the title question in the Technology area of The Atlantic Magazine on line. Deals with real-world robots and how "robot" is defined and notes works in popular culture from R. U. R. to "The Lonely" on Twilight Zone to THE TERMINATOR movies to a recent podcast on "Robot or Not?" Significant in discussing in a fairly popular venue — the one-line version of a major US magazine — the central question and such issues as how real-world robots are made "adorable" or "lovable," and not just frightening as they are in many works of art — and as an economic menace as cheap, docile labor.

A clearly announced key point is, "What matters [...] is who is in control—and how well humans understand that autonomy occurs along a gradient. Increasingly, people are turning over everyday tasks to machines without necessarily realizing it. 'People who are between 20 and 35, basically they’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date,' [John] Markoff told me. 'That’s a very subtle form of shifting control. It’s sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace [quoting Richard Brautigan and the title of Markoff's book].[[2]] Why should we trust them to work in our interest? Are they working in our interest? No one thinks about that.'” (An obvious limitation of the article is missing the contradiction of "No one thinks about that" after indicating how many people have been thinking about such issues for a long time.)