Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill_B
With Isaac Asimov out of the picture, the popular assault on just what constitutes a robot continues. These machines are "merely" remote controlled machinery as are the large majority of FRC machines. Calling them robots dilutes the concept of robotics severely, but the viewing public is too busy calling for more flames and flying debris to worry about such a fine point of definition.
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It's not really diluting anything.
Recalling the original concepts of robotics, Asimov (and Čapek) originally envisioned robots as basically androids. This was presumably because it was lot easier for them to be used as literary and dramatic characters if the robots could harbour their own emotions and motives (and, in the case of plays, be portrayed by humans). If dilution is such a problem, it seems to me we should be much more faithful to Čapek's original concept, and abandon our fixation on computers and mechanical parts—his robots had neither.
More crucial to the original concept, robots' autonomy was inextricably linked to the control exerted over them by humans—and the diminution of that control provided a convenient plot device. Nevertheless, the defining characteristic of a robot was always that it was a complex device that did labour so that people didn't have to. The element of human control has likewise been a constant: whether the operator told the robot to do something, or manipulated a joystick, the robot's role was to work for the human—and conflict inevitably arises when the robot doesn't do as instructed.
At that essential level, calling a teleoperated robot a robot is no dilution. It's just that you can't really anthropomorphize a robot that doesn't have the ability to do things apparently of its own volition. That would make for a boring story.
Besides, it was the engineers, not the general public that first likened machinery to the android robots from literature. They regarded their creations as the first steps toward the robots envisioned in the science fiction magazines, and adopted the same vocabulary to describe them.