Journal mcgrew's Journal: Rossum's Universal Robots 7
Slashdot has probably borked the text although it looks fine in preview. A non-borked version is at my blog.
Half a century ago I was reading a book by Isaac Asimov. I donâ(TM)t remember what book, but I know it wasnâ(TM)t I, Robot because I looked last night and it wasnâ(TM)t in that book. But in the book, whichever one it was, Dr. Asimov wrote about the origin of the word âoerobotâ; a story by Karel Capek titled R.U.R.: Rossumâ(TM)s Universal Robots.
I searched every library I had access to, looking for this story, for years. I finally gave up.
Then a few weeks ago I thought of the story again. I have no idea what triggered that thought, but it occurred to me that there was no internet back then, and since the book was so old, it would probably be at Gutenberg.org.
It was! I downloaded it, and to my dismay it was written in Czech. So I fed it to Google Translate.
Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase âoethe spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.â Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read âoeThe wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.â
I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
When I first saw the Czech version I could see that it was, in fact, not a novel, but a stage play. I kept looking, and found an English language version translated by an Australian. Itâ(TM)s licensed under the Creative Commons, so I may add it to my online library.
Wikipedia informed me that the play was written in 1920, and a man named Paul Selver translated it into English in 1923. So I searched Gutenberg for âoePaul Selverâ and there it was! However, it was in PDF form. Right now Iâ(TM)m at the tail end of converting it to HTML.
After reading it I realized that this story was the basis for every robot story written in the twentieth century, and its robots arenâ(TM)t even robots as we know robots today. Rather, they were like the âoereplicantsâ in the movie Blade Runnerâ"flesh and blood artificial people. That movie, taken from Philip K. Dickâ(TM)s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have actually been a sequel to R.U.R., had R.U.R. ended differently.
The Terminator was R.U.R. with intelligent mechanical robots instead of artificial life. Their aim, as the âoerobotsâ in Kapekâ(TM)s story, is to destroy all humans.
Asimov said that his robots were an answer to Frankenstein and R.U.R. He thought the very idea was ridiculous, so he made his own robots inorganic and mechanical rather than organic, and added his âoethree laws of roboticsâ. His laws werenâ(TM)t physical laws like the inability of anything to travel faster than light, but legislation; similar to Blade Runner, where the artificial people werenâ(TM)t allowed on Earth. In a few of his books, like The Caves of Steel, robot use on Earth is strictly limited and controlled and people hate them.
I thought Asimov had the first mechanical, non-magical robots, but I was wrong. There were fictional mechanical robots before Asimov was born. The first US science fiction dime novel was Edward S. Ellisâ(TM) 1865 The Steam Man of the Prairies, with a giant steam powered robot.
One thing that put me off about this play (besides the fact that itâ(TM)s a play, which is far better watched than read) was that the original story was written in a language I donâ(TM)t understand. Thatâ(TM)s why I donâ(TM)t read Jules Verne; his stories were written in French, and I donâ(TM)t speak that language, either.
I dislike translations because I used to speak Spanish well, according to South American tourists, and a smattering of Thai. And Iâ(TM)m a reader. Itâ(TM)s more than just the story, itâ(TM)s how itâ(TM)s written. There are word plays and idioms that are impossible to translate. For instance, a beautiful English phrase that uses alliteration would lose its beauty in any translation. And, there are no boring stories, only boring storytellers. I suspect that Kapek may have been an excellent writer, but Selver wasnâ(TM)t, to my mind. Little of the dialog seemed believable to me.
But in the case of this story, even the poor translation (Wikipedia informs me itâ(TM)s abridged) is worth reading, just for the context it places all other robot stories in.
It will be at mcgrewbooks.com soon.
Yup (Score:2)
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I'll bet. How did the jocks take to it?
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Another translation of that time (Score:2)
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Sounds like it would be useful as a band name generator.
"And next on our stage, give a big hand for The Invisible Insanities!"
The 3 Laws (Score:2)
Fwiw, the 3 laws were physical rules baked into the positronic brains. There were there from the beginning, because US Robotics realized that introducing human-capable machines would have social issues. Indeed there were, and the legislation came later, as you described.
I consider Asimov's formulation of the 3 laws as the first popular scientific attempt on how to deal with frankensteins that can be useful and not just fearful.
I look forward to checking out RUR. My first thought, too, was "I, Robot". I'm th
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I should have it posted in a day or two. Both translations will be there (the Australian one is better, but still not good enough as it has a fax, which wouldn't be invented for decades).