You know, when you think about it, one way of looking at autonomous vehicles is that they are robots that people can ride in.

The popular notion of a robot is something that resembles a human. That’s a conceptualization that comes directly from popular art. The very first mention of a robot was made 100 years ago, in 1920, when Czechoslovakian author Karl Capek coined the term in his play “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” The play, now better known as RUR, was first produced in 1921. The word “robot” was a derivation of the word for slave, and indeed, the robots in RUR were used essentially as cheap labor.

Rossum’s robots are flesh-and-blood creatures, barely distinguishable from humans. In fact, if you’ve seen the recent HBO presentation of “Westworld,” you’ll recognize a lot of themes and situations were already there in RUR 100 years ago.

Meanwhile, in the real world, robots of different shapes and sizes are ubiquitous in factories, and millions of people have robot vacuum cleaners shaped like big fat disks ceaselessly careening off the walls in their homes.

There are few other areas where the fictional and the real world inform each other so fully as they do in robotics. That’s an idea I wanted to explore with a friend of mine.

Mark Niemann-Ross has worked with both hardware and software, and recently has been offering training in Raspberry Pi. He’s also a published science fiction writer who’s written stories that I felt were germane to the subject. So in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the coinage of the word robot, I called him up to talk about robots — written and real.

We started at the beginning with, RUR.

It’s been 100 years. Have you even read the play, let alone seen it?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: I have seen it, and I believe I’ve read it.

BRIAN SANTO: You’ve seen it?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: It was such a long time ago that I saw or read it or something. It was… Actually, if you look it up on line, you can see stills from I think one of the original plays. This may be something that I’m fabricating in my mind, but I remember it from way, way back. It’s one of those things that my dad introduced me to for some reason.

BRIAN SANTO: Oh, how funny!

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah, he filled my head with all sorts of science fiction stuff. He was really big on Asimov and that kind of stuff. I remember going out to the garage, and he had all these science fiction pulp novels. I still have a few of them. They’re close to 60 or 70 years old at this point. I think that was in there someplace.

BRIAN SANTO: Somewhere along the line, I actually read the play. It’s mannered. It probably wouldn’t… I think I can understand why it isn’t presented live too often.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: It’s of the style at the time.

BRIAN SANTO: Yeah. But the basic concept… It’s not like it’s totally brand new, but the idea of a robot, a mechanical “servant,” that really kind of fixed it in probably the modern cultural imagination. Then all that science fiction that your dad probably bought, and so did we when we were kids. Man, robots galore, right?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: “I, Robot” and I have a book someplace called “Robby the Robot.”

BRIAN SANTO: Is it sort of like a fan book about the Robby the Robot from “Lost in Space”?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: No. Do you remember the Scholastic Book Club?

BRIAN SANTO: Yeah!

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah, right. This was one that came through the Scholastic Book Club. And it was this… No, no, no!! It wasn’t Robby the Robot. It was called “The Runaway Robot.”

BRIAN SANTO: Oh, okay.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: And it was the story about how this robot… It’s a very anthropomorphic robot gets on a space ship, and he goes off and has an adventure and all this kind of stuff. The one thing I remember from that is that this robot’s batteries are going low. And so there’s this whole complex story about how the robot manages to change its own batteries.

BRIAN SANTO: Oh! that’s actually kind of forward-thinking. Somebody actually thinking about the ramifications of what it’s like to actually have a robot in the real world.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Right. Right. Gotta have batteries; gotta have gears. Maybe even the first time that everyone ever considered robots being mortal.

BRIAN SANTO: Oh, interesting! Right. Right.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: What does the death of a robot look like? And this robot is scared. Again, anthropomorphic. But it’s like, “How am I going to do this?” And it figures it all out all by itself. It does into a washroom and somehow… into a toilet. It puts itself into a toilet stall in some space sport, and then opens up its front cavity and then reaches in and manages to jumper the cables. I’d have to go back and see exactly…

BRIAN SANTO: That’s excellent though. That’s the fun of it. There’s a strain of science fiction where people take a look at the actual technology and try to figure out how it would work in real life. “I, Robot” was really wicked cool. And of course it established the three laws of robotics. Oddly enough, Asimov, scientific as he was, had more interest in the interaction of robots and people than he did on how the robots actually worked.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: That’s the basic core behind science fiction. Technology is just there to explore the human interaction. Because quite honestly, you and I don’t relate to machines all that well.

BRIAN SANTO: True.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: We believe that they are there to serve us, and we willing to believe that there are no consequences to getting them to serve us. We start to get into philosophy here, but yeah.

BRIAN SANTO: This is a great entree… I was looking for an excuse to mention one of your most recent works. Your refrigerator is example of that. You begin to actually… Your refrigerator is the centerpiece of… is one of the characters in a basically a crime procedural. And you begin to actually sympathize with your refrigerator. That must have been fun to kind of try to put yourself in that head space.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah. You’re talking about “Stupid Machine.” The catch line is that it’s a murder mystery solved by a refrigerator. The really hard problem I had with that was relating to a machine that is not anthropomorphic. How do you get your head into the space of how a machine thinks? And then you have to write it so that a reader will find it engaging. I just about broke my mind trying to figure out how you voice a refrigerator in fiction without anthropomorphizing the damned thing and giving it emotions and human motivations.

BRIAN SANTO: It still has motivations.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: It has motivations, yeah. And in this case, it’s been told that it’s supposed to restock itself. It has ordered orange juice, but the orange juice never shows up. So its motivation through the entire story is to try and figure out why this product has not shown up. Well, that leads it into having to solve a mystery with these fleshy, meaty human things on the outside. But if that’s what I have to do to get the orange juice, then okay fine. That’s what I’ll do.

BRIAN SANTO: It was a great read. I had a great time with it.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Oh, good.

BRIAN SANTO: That kind of shows the transition from the robots that we have in our imagination, a hundred years’ worth of fictional robots, whether it’s Robby the Robot or…

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Wall-E, C3PO.

BRIAN SANTO: Right. The androids from “Westworld” and movie and “Westworld” the TV series.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Right. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember “Silent Running”?

BRIAN SANTO: Oh! Hughey, Dewey and Louie!

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Right! Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! Bruce Dern was in that. They started off… The cool thing about “Silent Running” was, they started off with robots that weren’t necessarily big, tall, walking people made out of metal. They had these little squat little things. But they really did finally give them little personalities. And they would talk back and forth. And the final scene is, of course, whichever one of them survives, he’s out looking, tending the garden and looking at the stars. It’s so romantic! That was an interesting story anyhow. Because of how they chose to make robots such a central part of the story.

BRIAN SANTO: Yeah. We anthropomorphize our robots in fiction. We were talking to Ayanna Howard from Georgia Tech a couple of episodes back. And she does a lot of research into how people respond to robots. Not just from the human-machine interface point of view, but how people emotionally respond to robots. And it’s really quite fascinating that whether the robot is anthropomorphic or anthropomorphized, we still almost respond to them as if they were people, characters, whatever.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: We totally emotionally invest into them. You think back on the Tamagotchi things that kids had. And God forbid you take it away from the kid, because it would die!

BRIAN SANTO: Right, right, right! Or people with Aibos, the Sony dog robots. They were actually kind of like emotional support animals.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Oh, sure!

BRIAN SANTO: And people responded to them as such. It’s really quite fascinating.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: It’s all I can do not to glue googly eyes on my Roomba. Just so I’m a little more comfortable about this thing running around my house without my supervision.

BRIAN SANTO: So is a Roomba technically a robot? How do you define robot?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: I stick with the classic definition, which is a robot is something that has sensors and can make a change in its environment somehow. Which means that like a computer, the desktop computer that we’re looking at, doesn’t really… okay, maybe it does… but it doesn’t really have sensors. And it certainly can’t interact in the physical world unless you drop it on your foot. Versus, and I’ll go out on a limb here, something like a dishwasher. That dishwasher, as I recently found out, has sensors that tell it how much water is in it. Then it can definitely interact with… It washes dishes. It makes dishes clean. So I would advance the idea that a dishwasher is a robot.

BRIAN SANTO: Interesting. Okay. I think I would agree with that. I’m not sure how much I would anthropomorphize my dishwasher, but then I also have to acknowledge that I’ve named some of my cars.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Well, do this. Glue a pair of googly eyes on your dishwasher.

BRIAN SANTO: Maybe my feelings would change.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: See how long it takes to name your dishwasher.

BRIAN SANTO: So you’ve read a lot of science fiction and watched science fiction shows. So have I. And I think a lot of people have. And we all have notions of what robots could be and should be, and now we’re beginning to see robots appearing in the real world. The question is, will the way we respond to robots and the way we expect to respond to robots, is that going to evolve? Are we going to change our idea of robots? There’s the Roomba going around the room, and maybe we’ll notice if the cat’s riding on top of it. But you look at the Boston Dynamics dog robot, and you can almost imagine interacting with that kind of thing.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: They’re designing that thing to be interacted with. Part of it is that they’ve designed both Atlas and Big Dog as being adapted to human spaces. Both of them can climb stairs. Both of them can bend over and pick things up. Big Dog has an articulated head with a clamper that can open doors and stuff. Because it’s going to deal with doors. Which are a very human sort of a concept. How will we interact with them? Again, I certainly tend to attach personalities to everything around me because it makes it easier for me to relate to that thing. I’m a squishy human being. That’s just my nature. I want to interact with all the things around me.

BRIAN SANTO: That shouldn’t be a problem unless, Mark, are they interacting back? Is your toaster really talking to you?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Well, this is where my psychologist comes in. Does the toaster back to me? You know what? In a little toaster fashion, my toaster does talk back to me.

BRIAN SANTO: That’s true.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: It has a little ding. And to be honest, my toaster dinging at me… dude, I can tell the toast is up. Just from watching. I don’t need you to do that. And I don’t need you to send me a text message to tell me that the toast is up. And yet there are toasters that will do that. But if you’re going to send me a text message that my toast is up, I want you to be polite about it. Just because I am who I am.

BRIAN SANTO: That’s kind of interesting. People program those reactions.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Oh, yeah.

BRIAN SANTO: Again, it’s somebody trying to figure out and expect how people will respond to whatever it is their robot is doing.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Part of it is marketing. My toaster sending me a text message, that’s some marketing guy. But if you’re designing a robot that… let’s say you’re talking about a law enforcement robot. The behaviors that you’re going to program into that thing are now pretty essential, because hopefully part of law enforcement is that you are reducing conflict in all of these meat sacks running around. You can do that with a soothing voice and a non-offensive posture. All the things that you and I recognize. Even a face. Is this face that I’m looking at angry? Or is it comforting? Or is it happy? Or all of those things versus two red circles in a blank face. How am I going to react to that?

BRIAN SANTO: There’s sort of like the Cylon from Battlestar Galactica versus… actually I’m thinking of the video game, the Fallout video games have certain robots with TV screens on their heads. They have actual human characteristics, a human face, on this robot that smiles and waves and says, “Howdy, pardner!”

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: That’s a really easy way to anthropomorphize a robot and be able to communicate with humans. A lot of our communication is nonverbal. So if a robot has to communicate with a person, it has to mimic some of those behaviors.

There’s a real interesting question that came out: How would a robot communicate with someone who’s autistic? Who’s on the spectrum, who doesn’t have the skills to recognize facial expressions, for example. If you want a robot to comfort someone who’s autistic, what tools do you have to communicate with that person? I don’t have the answer.

BRIAN SANTO: That’s fascinating. I think things like that are in fact being investigated. I know they are. One of my friends is autistic. He’s the son of a musician that I play with. He’s really far down enough on the spectrum that interaction is difficult. He interacts really well, with great facility, with an iPad.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Sure.

BRIAN SANTO: It may not be a robot, but clearly there’s something technological… I don’t know what his actual response is, but he appears comforted and calmed when he interacts with the technology.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah. And I’m personally completely unqualified to speculate as to what that would be, but I can believe it.

BRIAN SANTO: Exactly.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: We’re talking about anthropomorphic robots. At some point, you… anthropomorphic robots are out there because they have to interact with a human world. But what happens when you remove the human world and just have a task? For example, if you have an autonomous car, right now there’s all sorts of stuff that you have to dial in to an autonomous car to keep it from running into humans. Because humans are messy. They just walk around and they’re totally unpredictable and nobody knows what the hell they’re going to do next. But if you put an autonomous car with a bunch of other autonomous cars on a closed freeway, now you don’t need to worry about some bozo walking across the street. All you need to worry about is all of the other predictable cars that you can communicate with in a machine sort of code.

So if you remove the fetters of human interaction, what does that robot start to look like? Hypothetical question.

BRIAN SANTO: You can imagine more sophisticated space probes with some level of autonomy instead of like getting a downloaded instruction from Houston or Florida or something.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: All of the space probes that we send out right now have a certain level of autonomy. They have to. They don’t have arms. They have optical sensors and stuff. So they’ve definitely been designed for a specific task that doesn’t involve having to worry about some meat bag stuffing their fingers in.

BRIAN SANTO: What do you think about the notion that robots with autonomy might become dangerous?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: I wrote a note here that says, “Armed robots don’t kill people. Poorly designed algorithms kill people.”

BRIAN SANTO: True. That’s the interesting thing. There’s research. I would have to go and find it. Find where it was conducted and the specifics. But somebody had trained a simulation, and each of the simulated elements within this simulation had to figure out a way to just behave with regard to each other, and it quickly descended into basically hostility between… they self-created hostility between the elements within this enclosed computerized system.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: There’s the Google Chat bot that started to become racist.

BRIAN SANTO: Oh, right!

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: And they finally shut it down. That actually flows into this. That thing became racist because the learning set that it was given, which was a bunch of people on Twitter, they just fed it a bunch of racist stuff. And that’s what it learned! I think “Westworld” makes an excellent point on that. All those robots have been presented with is violence. In the end, that’s what they learned. They think this is the norm.

Getting back to the original point, should we be afraid of robots that are armed? I think in general it’s a bad idea to give a robot a lethal weapon. A robot with a sense of autonomy a lethal weapon. There are a lot of nuances.

BRIAN SANTO: If we go back to fiction again, did you ever read “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: That one I haven’t read.

BRIAN SANTO: Basically, the robots get essentially the Asimovian three commandments. And they’re like, We don’t want you to do that anymore because it’s dangerous and you might hurt yourself. So we’re going to take that away from you. And we don’t want you to do this anymore because it’s dangerous and we’re going to take that away from you. And they just keep taking things away, and it’s chilling. And then in the follow-up, interestingly enough, they start taking away war machines. And the hero of the novel, as such (and this is really sly on Williamson’s part), the hero of the novel is like, Give me back my bombs just in case I need them. And the guy he’s in conflict with philosophically is sort of like, No, seriously; you don’t need those.

So there’s like this weird arc in this fictional thing. And you kind of wonder, if you do give… can there be unintended consequences of even what we might think of as benign programming?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah. This gets into the whole concept of robot of benevolent overlord. Which was what Skynet was supposed to be, and then it was, Oops; that one didn’t work out. We are talking about what kind of programming you put into this thing, what’s your intended goal, and then you try to translate that into… it’s an alien being. Computers and machines and robots don’t think like we do.

BRIAN SANTO: Even if we try to make them think like we do, they don’t.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: They still don’t. They can mimic. They can mimic you and I, maybe really, really well, but in the end, they’re… Any brain research you look at, how the brain makes a decision is kind of a wishy-washy sort of randomized walk. Right now, at least the computers we have, not to say that things won’t change, but the computers that we have right now are very directed, very binary. We don’t think in yes and no. We think maybe. This could work. It’s again, Commander Data being confused about that whole human state of things. And why would you take a risk like that when you don’t know the statistics of the risk that you’re taking. It’s like… Maybe Ryker gets up there and goes, Hey, watch this. Hold my beer.

BRIAN SANTO: Hold my beer.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: You asked, Should we be afraid of robots? And we jumped right to the terminators. But there’s also the whole economics of, should we be concerned about robots. We’ve been through this before with the Luddites.

BRIAN SANTO: Well you know, a lot of smart people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are thinking, You know, we know that we’ve said, Oh more automation could be bad in the past, but this time… There are so many endeavors that could be automated and are being. You’re probably familiar with the ability of one system to make predictions… They’re almost as good and sometimes better as some oncologists in reading x-rays and detecting cancer. There are so many things that could be automated that we assume should be a human thing but doesn’t necessarily have to be.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: I’ve read that stuff. We’re rapidly slipping into an area where we are looking at being assisted by artificial intelligence. What you’re talking about here is artificial diagnose, artificial intelligence diagnoses in the medical field. And we would like to believe that our squishy meat space is our primary domain. But in the case of oncology, a lot of it right now is just imagery that we’re interpreting. There may be a line of no return or “beyond here lie dragons.” I’m not sure we’ve reached it, and I’m not sure we’ll know when we’ve crossed it. When is too much automation…

So here’s a for-instance. You and I remember when the Macintosh turned into a typesetting machine. Before that time was hot lead and cold type and all that kind of stuff, and we paid people a lot of money to be typesetters and they knew about kerning and all of the fine craft of setting type and how beautiful type could be and why the word “wave” is such a difficult word in typography. You know, capital W, a, capital V. And then the Macintosh came out, and that all went away. There are no more typesetters… Typesetting is not a profession anymore. A lot of people went out of business. On the other hand, a lot more people can set type. So is that technology an advantage? Or did it just reduce the human condition?

I used to be a typesetter. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to do that anymore.

BRIAN SANTO: I guess the issue isn’t so much any particular endeavor. I think it’s the potential for how many endeavors all at once could be automated in a very short amount of time, and giving people not enough time to adjust to whatever… And there might not be anything to adjust to if there are that many endeavors being automated.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: That’s an excellent point. When you put it into the context of, Are we giving people a chance to adjust to the change? That becomes real thing. Speaking in the time of COVID, everything changed in the space of weeks. And possibly even days. And our lives have totally turned around. Thing have changed; jobs have disappeared. And the marketplace is trying to adjust to that change. It’s not doing a really good job of it.

BRIAN SANTO: No. It’s amazing how quickly… If nothing else, this has taught us how quickly things can change and how difficult it is to respond.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah.

BRIAN SANTO: Let me switch gears again. What do you think about the prospect of cyborgs? Half humans, half robots.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: We’re already there.

BRIAN SANTO: Exactly.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: You wear glasses, right?

BRIAN SANTO: That’s true, too.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Okay. I wear glasses. And I have fillings in my teeth. Oh my god! If I have to drive someplace and I don’t turn on GPS, I am lost immediately. Even one block from my house. Is that the cyborg of science fiction where all that stuff is implanted inside my head and I’m physically recharging an internal battery? No, not yet. But I am relying on devices.

BRIAN SANTO: Not for the average person, but there are people out there who have pacemakers with little tiny batteries that do every harvesting.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Sure. Right. For example. And we’re going to get more and more used to it. It’s only a matter of time before we have tattoos that are electrically conductive.

BRIAN SANTO: Wow! Where did I hear that before? I do want to mention, since I’ve got you here, that’s another story you wrote, wasn’t it?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: That was a story called, “Phantom Sense.” That’s actually a really interesting point. This was about a character that had an antenna tattooed onto his back that he could then control small insects with implanted cyborg chips and controllers, and use those insects as an extension…

BRIAN SANTO: Drone insects, right?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Right. So in a sense it was a human-insect-cyborg system that had been created to give this guy extrasensory perception, essentially.

BRIAN SANTO: So these are the tattoos you were referring to a moment ago. Sorry for interrupting and patting you on the back.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Thanks. I appreciate the pitch. Shameless pitch, right? But in that story I didn’t go as far as saying that those tattoos would be computers. They were just antennas. But there’s no reason that we won’t at some point be able to print a circuit on skin using conductive ink. So, Brian, if your insurance covered it, would you be willing to have a directional augmentation implanted on your right shoulder that, if you turned north, it would reward you with a little dose of endorphin? Now you’re never lost, right?

BRIAN SANTO: I might go for a more fun drug, but I honestly don’t know.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Just think: Who knows what the reward for turning north is, but now you’re camping and you don’t need a compass anymore.

BRIAN SANTO: That’s right.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Now you always do know where north is located. And if I can get that as part of my insurance, because the insurance says, If you do put this in, there’s a better chance that you will survive your camping trips, so your insurance rate will go down. I’m winging it here, but that’s definitely a cybernetic enhancement.

BRIAN SANTO: I don’t think that’s… You say you’re winging it, but insurance companies are already taking a look at, Will you let us have access to your automobile’s sensors so that we can see how good of a driver you are and reward you for good driving behavior? It’s semi-external, but it’s a short hop, skip and a jump to an implant.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Oh, sure. And there’s also… Once we start walking down this path, would you be willing to get cheaper health care if your health care company could monitor your digestive tract? Are you eating well?

BRIAN SANTO: That’s a new idea for me, and maybe I would go for it. But would my kids? I don’t know.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: But let’s say you’re spending $1,000 a month on health care, which you probably are. And I’m your health care insurance guys, and I say, Hey, Brian, it’s a painless procedure; it’ll take five minutes for everyone in your family; and we will drop your insurance rate by half. What do you say?

BRIAN SANTO: It’s pretty darned tempting, isn’t it?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah. And now all of a sudden, you’re broadcasting your really personal data. We can go from there. On the other hand, talk about Michael Crichton’s “Terminal Man.” Do you remember that story?

BRIAN SANTO: It’s one I haven’t read. Go.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: So in “Terminal Man,” the guy that we’re talking about accepts a small computer in his head. He’s got epilepsy. Anytime the computer senses that he’s going to go into an epileptic fit, it basically shocks him. And it turns out later on that in fact this computer is also dosing his pleasure centers as part of that. So what the terminal man eventually does, and I’m giving away the plot here, is he starts to put himself in situations that trigger epileptic encounters so he can get that pleasurable shock. Well, unfortunately, the situations that he puts himself into are things like murdering people.

BRIAN SANTO: It’s fiction.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: You gotta have a murder someplace, right? But in that case, we’ve got a situation where an epileptic person has accepted a device, it’s like a pacemaker, for example, but it gets a little bit… A pacemaker shocks your heart. How do you feel about a small pacemaker shocking your optical center? We don’t know the answer yet.

BRIAN SANTO: I remember talking to the chief scientist at Microsoft for many years, many years ago, Nathan Myhrvold. I was talking to him one time and I was like, Did you really mean it? And he was like, Yes. I absolutely meant it. If I could download my brain into a robot, I would do it in a second.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Now there’s an interesting topic. Let’s talk for a minute about brain in a box. And duplicating your personality into a robot. I don’t know if you’ve been following the research, but what they’re finding out is that your gut influences your emotions…

BRIAN SANTO: The research has been around for five or seven years, and it still kind of surprises me.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah. Well, you think about it. When you’ve got a cold or a fever, I don’t know about you, but I’m slightly irritable.

BRIAN SANTO: Yes.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: And I become a really bad patient, and I don’t want to interact with people. I become real anti-social. That has nothing to do with my brain functioning. It has everything to do with my body functioning. So why do I bring that up? It’s because when you put a brain in a box, are you also putting in a substitute for all of that gut interaction? Or do you give the brain in a box a flue once in a while, or simulate a flue, so that it has a flue personality. And if you don’t…

One thing I was reading was that quadriplegics, where they can’t feel the lower half of their body, they mentioned that their emotions before the accident and after the accident are different.

BRIAN SANTO: Fascinating.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: They feel like their emotions are subdued after the accident.

BRIAN SANTO: Interesting. And there’s expectation that there might be a brain-gut connection?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Some sort of thing, yeah. I’ve played with the idea of writing a story about brain in a box, with the idea that you lose emotion. How would people do that? And how does that affect… One thing I’ve been thinking about is, if you put a brain in a box, can it take communion?

BRIAN SANTOS: In the religious sense?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yeah, yeah. And is that even something that it would relate to? I’m touching on a deep one here, because for some people, religion is a really, really highly emotional thing. If you think about communion, it’s a very physical thing. You are talking about the body and the blood and wine and cheese and crackers and eating things and the taste of it, and there’s all this sensory…

BRIAN SANTOS: Don’t get us into too much trouble, Mark.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Without going any further, you understand where we’re going here.

BRIAN SANTO: You’re right. We are spiritual animals, and there’s a physical component as much as there is a spiritual and mental and emotional component. It really is a fascinating question. I’m not sure if I could even speculate on that, but if you did I’d read the story.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Something to do in my free time.

BRIAN SANTO: Exactly. Hey, Mark, this is a good time to wrap it up. Thank you so much for your time.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Brian, thanks. This was really enjoyable, and I really appreciate swapping ideas like this.

BRIAN SANTO: Maybe we’ll have you back sometime. We’ll find out if there’s like a 100th anniversary of like the word “computer” or something.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: That’s great. I’ll let you know if I have any more implants put in.

BRIAN SANTO: Okay, great. Bye, Mark.

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: All right, Brian. Bye-bye.

BRIAN SANTO: Completely independently, one of the contributors to EE Times noticed the anniversary of the word “robot,” too. We recently published an article from the irrepressible David Benjamin that celebrates cinema robots – or, as they’ve been alternatively known since 1977, droids.

It’s called, “Robo-Stars: The Three Greatest Droids of All Time.” In it, Benji establishes a Droid Hall of Fame, and he’s taking nominations for candidates. The Hall of Fame is entirely fictional, too, but don’t let that stop you. As you might expect, there’s a link to Benji’s story on this podcast episode’s webpage.