TECHSPLOITATION: Artificial Intelligence
"AlterNet.org"

Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
August 5, 2002

Abnormal technology.
Science fiction writers love to speculate about the abnormal psychology of robots. That's the pathos of the robot - designed to have the perfect mind, it nevertheless malfunctions and becomes a calm-voiced, sociopathic HAL, or a tragically doomed rebel like the replicants in "Blade Runner," or the feminist death-bot in "Eve of Destruction." When Isaac Asimov set out to write the first definitive work of robot S.F., "I, Robot" (1955), he did it by creating a character called a "robopsychologist" whose observations of abnormal robotic psychology formed the meat of the tale.
Researchers haven't yet invented a robot whose psychology is complicated enough to be equivalent to that of a "normal" person, let alone a neurotic one. It's safe to say that all these speculations about the insanity of machines are really meditations on our own mental failures and cognitive disasters. Even true tales about the behavior of actually existing robots -- like the small "evolving" robot in England named Gaak that managed to escape from its cage and zoom out the doors of a building and into the parking lot -- read like allegories of human life. Trapped in a lab, forced to fight for scant resources with its fellow lab-bots, Gaak said, "Fuck this," and ran away when it had the chance. Just like you would, right?
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On Robotics via News Is Free