Second Variety

"Second Variety is… OK, have you ever seen The Terminator ? You know that part at the very beginning – it’s this apocalyptic future and there are these humanoid cyborgs with red glowing eyes marching over a field of human skulls, spraying everything down with these Gatling guns, and the humans are being chased around like rats? Then of course it cuts to Los Angeles and you’re thinking ‘Damn! I wanted to see that movie.’ Well this is that movie. Second Variety is what I just described almost exactly. I don’t know the complete provenance, but there is no way that Second Variety didn’t have some impact on the whole Terminator world. The story is primarily concerned with ‘How do you tell a human from a robot?’ But what I found most interesting about it was that it was an apocalyptic future, in which human beings had built machines not to kill other human beings, but to learn how to kill other human beings. The robots initially were just landmines, they were very simple things. They learned how to camouflage themselves, and then human beings became more scarce and smarter, so the robots actually had to begin to learn how to mimic us. What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. That’s just a really, really cool concept to me; it’s a powerful message. Whether or not roboticists should put effort into making incredibly human-like robots called androids is a topic of debate among scientists. On the one side, you can argue that you’re never going to be able to hit this target: there’s this uncanny valley and you’re always just going to fall into it and creep people out. The uncanny valley is this phenomenon ­– a psychological phenomenon that’s been demonstrated experimentally – that shows human beings get really scared by objects that look almost like human beings, but not quite. And it really bears out intuitively. If you think about zombies – that’s a human being, almost entirely, the only thing that’s wrong is that they’re staggering around, the gait is wrong, they’re not breathing. From a robotics perspective, these are all little things off on the margins. From a distance, zombies look like people, they walk around. But it’s not good enough. There’s an argument that this is a fundamental human reaction that is never going to change. You’re never going to get used to it. On the other side, there are a lot of really good reasons to have androids. Human beings are designed to interact with other human beings. We very quickly, as children, learn how to recognise speech, other people’s emotions, their gestures, what’s going on in their heads. We are experts at figuring out what other people are thinking. And if you make a machine that looks like another person, then you’ve created the most natural interface possible, and therefore a machine that is optimally interacting with other people – as long as you’re not scaring the shit out of them! That’s a little bump in the road there for people who are designing androids. My feeling is that this is research that absolutely should be done, and yes it’s challenging, but never say never – there are a lot of benefits associated with having androids around."