The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Automata for the people
A blockbuster exhibition traces the rise of the robot
THINK of a robot and most of us will probably conjure up the same vision – roughly humanoid, probably silver, flashing dead eyes and an “I-am-a-ro-bot” type of voice. Personal proclivities dictate whether yours is closer to the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, a Terminator T-800 or Star Wars’ C-3PO, but you get the gist.
The word robot, coined from Rossom’s Universal Robots, a 1920s Czech play by Karel Capek – the word robot meaning worker – might be new, but the medium it describes isn’t. Tacye Phillipson, senior curator of modern science at the National Museum of Scotland, the final stop on the UK tour of the Science Museum’s blockbuster Robots exhibition, points out that we have been trying to create walking, talking human (and animal) replicas for well over 2,000 years.
The cultures of the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, of medieval Islam, all had their own jaw-dropping mechanical devices. This exhibition brings some of these historic automata together with robots of the future and provokes questions of exactly where on the spectrum of robot as human we feel comfortable.
Make it past the somewhat creepy animatronic baby in the entrance – this is Phillipson’s own “robot too far” – and you will find a plethora of iconic mechanical people, including a replica of Maria from Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Metropolis, whose look inspired both reality and sci-fi.
There is the flamboyant Cygan, a very 1950s Italian robot which, despite the decade of its construction, did not take mundane domestic tasks out of the hands of the housewife. There is Inkha, the sarcastic reception robot, which used to be stationed in the hallway of King’s College in London, now ready to interact with exhibition visitors.
Her repertoire is limited, apparently, but she will probably give you short shrift.
There is also Robothespian – the first humanoid robot available to buy on the open market, provided you have a spare
£50,000. It can perform plays in 30 languages, tell jokes and sing songs, although for that money, you might note, you could probably go to the theatre every night of the week for the rest of your life.
And in among the 1960s tin robots from Japan and the futuristic robots of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (its top toy, Nasa’s Valkyrie robot, is not at the exhibition but documented), there is the aforementioned T-800 robot endoskeleton from the Terminator films, for those who need reminding of the potential pitfalls of building artificially intelligent robots in our own image.
“I think, when it comes down to it, we’re either exploring the apocalypse or looking at an imagined utopia where we’re all sitting down while robots wait on us hand and foot,” laughs Phillipson. The two are probably not mutually exclusive.
But it turns out it is very hard to recreate a working humanoid body in robot form, which may give some succour.
The Valkyrie robot has a safety harness, Phillipson tells me, to stop it being damaged when it falls over. “I asked the researchers how often the safety harness comes into play,” she