The curse of the six-armed robot

The movie and television dramatizers seem to have decided that the major threats to the future of humanity are creatures from other planets, vampires, werewolves, zombies or robots. They turn out constant scenarios about such annoyances.

I don’t worry about the possibility of those supernatural or unnatural troublemakers ever becoming reality, especially since the modern creators of scenarios about such malevolent beings have strayed so far from the classic beginnings of their ilk, in tales so much better told by H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mrs. Shelly and other imaginators.

Modern filmmakers have dis- torted the concepts of horror movie characters that have removed all the perverse charm my antique generation found in Lugosi vampires, Karloff monsters and mummies, Chaney Jr. wolf-persons and those zombies who didn’t nibble brains as today, but threw nifty fire-lit voodoo dance parties.

Robots in 1930s and ’40s movies were usually just automated tin men. They were rarely as frightening as the monsters Hollywood produced.

But robots are real and constantly getting more so. This was brought home to me by a little 50-word item in a news magazine.

It reported that a Germanmade robot broke its own world record by solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle in .637 seconds. Don’t miss the decimal point in front of that number.

Compare that with the blink of an eye, which runs about .1 to .4 of a second, according to the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers. That’s pretty blinking fast.

That robot can identify the color on each square of the little cube, use a special algorithm in its electronic brain and twist the cube to line up its colors in 24 moves.

Now, somebody had to infuse that algorithm into the robot’s brain. That’s consoling. But here’s what worries me. That robot has six arms!

I’m not saying that I could do any better, Rubik-wise, if I had six arms. But somehow, like most of us human persons, I picture your typical robot to be at least a little humanoid, clicking the cube with a decent number of hands and fingers.

Now I realize that robots can be bolted together with extra arms. They may not just replace human beings in the work place. One of them might replace a whole crew.

It’s no more “You hold a wrench on the bottom pipe, Harry, and George, hold one on the top, and Max, you hold the light, and I’ll stand here and scratch my head and supervise.” One multi-armed robot will handle the whole job, while the crew takes a driverless Uber down to the automated unemployment office.

Think what a six-armed robot could do. One six-armed robot could perform Brahms Piano Trio No. 1 with two arms handling the piano, two others the violin and the last two the cello.

Imagine the restaurant hostess saying, “Table for six? Let me show you to our robot section, where our six-armed auto-server Electro-Pierre will wait on you.”

Six-armed robots would make great house painters, supermarket cashiers/baggers, cow milkers, short order cooks, day care center kiddie controllers, trash collectors, soccer goalies, fruit pickers, railroad conductors, ball park hot dog vendors — think about it.

If you have a job for which you often wish you had more than two hands, maybe you should start to worry. And if you’re a film producer, you might start thinking about a production called “Curse of the Six-Armed Robot.”

Maybe I’m safe for a little while. I haven’t heard of any plans for robot newspaper columnists.