As far back as the mechanical Turk and as recently as “robots” that turn out to be remote controlled by humans and not really autonomous, the cheapest way to get a robot to do a human-level job is to have a human really do it. What are some fictional examples of that happening and how society responds?
That is the premise of the Pacific Rim movies. In the near future, gigantic robots, each piloted by two humans (left and right brain hemispheres?) fight for our survival against monsters from the deep. An example of Centaurs, not so much ‘disguised’ controllers.
Thanks. I’d like to focus on the cases where the fact that apparent robots are really controlled by people is secret.
Funny you should mention the Mechanical Turk, because this is the premise of The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesly, by Sean Lusk. An English clockmaker is forced by his government to go do spy stuff in Constantinople. He’s a skilled maker of automata, so he constructs a chess-playing structure, which is supposed to play chess with the Sultan, but which he actually hides inside, so that he can spy on conversations during the chess game. As I recall he’s caught pretty quickly. It’s more of an intrigue subplot rather than a main exploration of societal response to fraud. But it’s a fictional example of the thing you describe!
(Also a really excellent book.)
Would this include robots that are “hacked” by people.
David Brin’s “Kiln People” might fit into this category… where robots are clay golems rather than mechanical forms.
Wandering the landscape of a post-collapse America, David Brin’s eponymous Postman encounters an AI being maintained by the remnants of a University staff.
It turns out that the staff now run it as an Oz-like sham*, since the infrastructure to keep the real system running broke down long ago.
The question posed: is this lie justified by the sense of hope and purpose it imparts to the surrounding populace?
- ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is clearly another example to cite.
That’s the kind of example I’m looking for - and one I should have thought of.Thanks
Everyone knows they are not quite machines though - there’s no deception involved
William Gibson’s The Peripheral talks about how humans are hired to operate so called robots in a different time continuum.
Spreading out a bit like that, I’d say The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich and Can-D would satisfy this. Humans are addicted to a sim type world that they have physical mini-golems. Take a drug and the consciousness inhabits the golem and you can live an alternate life. You buy things for them to use, EG: house, cars, etc. And live vicariously through them. Of course it’s all controlled by a psycho megalomaniac and goes, well, wrong.
A bit of a playbook for Mush and his X platform’s future as well.
Early in Vinge’s “Deepness in the Sky” the Emergents appear to have artificial intelligence that works incredibly well - but it’s really enslaved/brainwashed slaves who are doing the work.
This story, “Skeleton Crew” has a haunted house purportedly run by AI, but its really telepresence-operated by people
Although the House of A.I.’s official selling point was an advanced A.I. that could read facial expressions and produce an individually customized haunted house experience, some people seemed to be mostly attracted by the prospect of messing with the A.I.
But there was no A.I. Customers had been promised one, back when House of A.I. had been selling tickets a year in advance, attracting celebrity investors, buying and renovating an actual abandoned mansion on a tiny private island. But it turned out that no money on Earth could build the A.I. that the House’s billionaire founder had envisioned. The developers tried to buy time by hiring Aroha and her co-workers to control the haunted house robots, patching in a hacked-together remote interface where the A.I. was supposed to be. They were meant to be replaced with the real A.I. once they had provided enough training data. But launch day came and went, and two years later the only sign of A.I. was a few functions meant to keep Aroha and her co-workers in line, functions whose hostility was rivaled only by their profound shoddiness.
The mentats of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe are human operants trained to perform the duties of the computers banished by the Butlerian Jihad.
In his ‘Mirrorsun’ series (“Souls in the Machine”, “The Miocene Arrow”) Sean McMullen describes a steampunk world where indentured labourers operate as elements of a calculating machine (the ‘Calculor’)
Indeed ‘computer’ originally referred to a person employed to perform portions of a complex calculation.
The key element in my challenge is the intent to fool people into believing that AI is involved when it isn’t. That probably applies to Calculor but not Dune