Review: “I, Robot”

Plot:

The year is 2035, and highly advanced robots (most of which are humanoid) are everywhere. Many of them have superhuman levels of strength, speed and agility, and they are over 1 billion in number [U.N. projections say there will be about 9 billion humans by then]. In spite of the obvious threat they might pose to the human race, people trust they won’t turn hostile because they are programmed with supposedly unalterable failsafes and lack emotions and self-drive. Those critical assumptions about the machines are cast into doubt when a top roboticist is murdered at the headquarters of the U.S. Robotics company, and the detective assigned to the case (played by Will Smith) discovers that a robot might have been responsible.

Analysis: 

Most houses and buildings will look the same as they do today. At the beginning of the film, we see Will Smith’s apartment, which looks identical in size, layout and furnishings to a 2018 apartment. The only thing kind of futuristic is a single-bladed ceiling fan, which you could probably buy today from a rich man’s novelty store like Brookstone or SkyMall. Will Smith then visits his grandmother’s apartment, which is not futuristic in any way (until later in the film, when she gets a house robot). Shortly after that, we see a panoramic of Chicago’s skyline, and while there are several new, futuristic skyscrapers and elevated highways, most of the city is still made of old brick buildings. There are even some street scenes showing graffiti-covered walls and run-down fronts of buildings.

And later, Will Smith and his boss have beers after work at a grimy little restaurant that looks of 1950’s vintage, except for the robot bartender and flatscreen TV. I, Robot accurately shows how future technologies will be integrated into the built environment in 2035: Most of it will just be overlaid onto older things. For example, a brick apartment building from the 1940s will have solar panels installed on its roof and might have a gigantic TV screen draped over its side. The apartments themselves won’t change from their original floor sizes and layouts, and they’ll still be full of furnishings that people in the 1940s would recognize (beds, tables, chairs, refrigerators, etc.), but they will have robots running around inside them doing work.

The only kind of “furnishing/appliance” I think will vanish between now and 2035 is the traditional home entertainment center, which typically consists of a large, heavy TV–often supported by a table–video and game devices like Blu-ray players and Playstations, and a shelf full of movie and game discs. By 2035, TVs will be at most a centimeter thick (and possibly as thin as paper) and will be hung on walls, and all videos and games will be streamed from the internet or from a personal hard drive. Either there will be no more player devices, or at most a person will need one, small box device that plays every type of media and interfaces with game controllers. Discs will be long obsolete.

There will be wall-sized displays. In the film, there are billboard-sized TV screens on the sides of some buildings that mostly play commercials. This will prove accurate for 2035, and the TVs will have 8K or even 16K resolution. I already discussed this in my review of Prometheus and won’t go into it at length again. 

Prices will be inflated. In the aforementioned movie scene where Will Smith and his boss get beers at a restaurant, the final tab for a burger and a couple drinks is $46.50. Yes, inflation will naturally continue, and both wages and prices will be much higher in 2035. Moreover, assuming a constant price inflation rate of 3.0%, the term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries by 2100 since by then, inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD is in 2018.

Autonomous cars that drive as well as humans will be widespread. Will Smith’s car has a self-driving feature. At the rate the technology is improving, the 2030’s will be the decade when self-driving car technology becomes widespread in rich countries. The decade could start with self-driving cars being an expensive luxury feature that most people mistrust and with self-driving cars only comprising 1-5% of all cars on the road, and the decade will probably end with self-driving features coming as standard on new vehicles, and 50% of cars having autonomous capabilities. Will Smith has a luxury sedan in 2035, which is consistent with this prediction.

The typical passenger car in a rich country won’t use gas. Towards the end of the film, Will Smith brings his motorcycle out of storage for the climactic battle with the machines. Bridget Moynahan–a roboticist at USR who is helping him with his murder investigation–gets on the back and says: “Don’t tell me this bike runs on gas!”, indicating that some alternative car fuel technology predominates in the 2035, and gas-powered vehicles are the exception. Considering the large amount of fossil fuels still available, the heavy investment in related infrastructure, and the time it takes for the vehicle fleet to turn over, I think gasoline will still be the primary fuel for vehicles in 2035. However, I think important technological advances in other areas will be seriously threatening its dominance, and a large fraction of vehicles will use something else. If anything, batteries will be cheaper and more energy dense thanks to incremental tech improvements, so electric cars will be practical for everyday use.

We already know this is possible: the Tesla Model 3 is a purely battery-powered vehicle that exists today, has very good drive characteristics and a 310 mile range on a single charge (which is the same range a comparable gas-powered sedan has on a full tank). The big problem is the car’s high manufacture costs, which are somewhere between $44,000 and $50,000 apiece, putting them out of reach of most people. About $10,000 of the cost is due to the battery pack, meaning future improvements in battery technology are crucial for making electric cars mainstream. Such improvements are entirely possible: we know that the energy density of modern batteries could, in theory, be improved by a factor of at least 3 to 6 (http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology) . It’s not going to be easy to get there, but considering the research dollars being thrown at the problem, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the advances will happen by 2035, and average-income people will be able to afford battery powered cars with ~300 mile ranges.

Breakthroughs in fast battery charging tech, fuel cells, and using synthetic microorganisms to synthesize chemical fuels in a carbon-neutral manner could also realistically happen by 2035. Whichever of these becomes most popular, by 2035 there will definitely be viable alternatives to using gasoline in personal vehicles, but it will take decades more to turn over the whole fleet of gas-powered cars.

There will be fully automated factories.  In one scene, Will Smith visits a factory that builds robots and finds it is fully automated, meaning no humans work there. Instead, robots build other robots. Considering the decades-long decline in manufacturing sector employment numbers, I think the total obsolescence of human factory workers is inevitable, the only question is how soon it will happen. By 2035, I think high-tech companies like today’s Apple will have fully automated factories, mostly to demonstrate their technical prowess to the public and not necessarily because it’s cheaper than having any human workers. However, this will be atypical, and in almost all modern factories there will still be some humans, though they will be very highly trained people vastly outnumbered by machines, and there will be far fewer of them than today. Other areas of the economy, including agriculture and the service sector, will also be much more heavily automated by 2035, and it will be common to see this in everyday life in the form of robots restocking shelves at Wal-Mart and machine arms handing you your food at the McDonald’s drive-thru. I have no doubt that all low-skill jobs will ultimately be done by machines, liberating humans from drudgery (though also probably causing massive structural unemployment).

There will be ubiquitous surveillance. In the film, every room and hallway in the USR headquarters building has a continuous “sensor strip” running horizontally across the top section of the wall. The sensor strip apparently has tiny cameras, microphones, speakers, and holographic image emitters built into it, so everything happening inside the building is continuously recorded, and the building’s evil A.I. can physically manifest itself anywhere as a talking hologram. While I don’t think there will be “sensor strips” as depicted in the film, I, Robot still nailed some key aspects of life in 2035 with the concept. As I’ve written before, tiny sensors will be everywhere in our environment and on our bodies well before 2035, meaning most things happening in public spaces and even inside of houses and buildings will be recorded. Computers will also be smart enough to understand what is happening in the recordings and which people are in them, so yes, if an evil A.I. wanted to track your activities in 2035, it could do so.

And thanks to tiny microphones and speakers being built into future televisions (again, I’ve already gone over this in a note), you could indeed interact with the evil A.I. just by talking and having the wall TV suddenly come alive as its portal to you. The wall TV might even project the A.I.’s image as a hologram instead of as a 2-D moving picture. Alternatively, you could have the same interaction through your augmented reality glasses, which will also be a mature and widespread consumer technology by 2035.

Robots will pervade our daily lives. Of course, the one thing dominating I, Robot’s depiction of the future is robots. They’re all over the place doing all sorts of jobs. Multipurpose humanoid robots called “Nestor Series Robots” stay in peoples’ houses doing chores like cooking food, and they run around in public doing other tasks like walking dogs, delivering mail, dumping trash cans into garbage trucks. They have superhuman levels of speed and strength. Other, more task-specific robots with non-humanoid designs do things like demolish old buildings (Will Smith almost gets killed by one of these) and clean roadways of debris. While I don’t think the robots with the dexterity, speed, and intelligence of the Nestor Series will exist by 2035, I think the clunkier task-specific robots will, and they will be getting widespread.

After all, if computers are smart enough to drive cars by that year, it stands to reason that they’d also be smart enough to sweep highways, mow lawns, pick crops, and do some household chores. So yes, in 2035, you will encounter robots each day, either inside your home or in public, or both. You might go into a McDonald’s and see an R2D2-style robot with six arms flipping burgers. The trash truck that empties out dumpsters into itself won’t have any human beings in it. You might have a robot in your home that understands your verbal commands and can do things like wash dishes, operate your laundry machine and drag your trashcans to the curb. It will be slow, clumsy and weak compared to a human and probably won’t look like a human, but it will safely and reliably do tasks around the house and will be worth the money. It will probably adapt to your schedule and do all the work during the daytime when you were away at work or school, and then get out of the way when you were around (like how most people use Roomba vacuum cleaner robots today). As in the movie, these robots will automatically download software patches and updates, some of which would endow it with new skills and abilities.

We will have built massive, new infrastructure in densely populated areas. In the movie, Chicago has underground highway tunnels that cars speed through at 100 mph. Um, no. Seventeen years isn’t enough time to build that, and if it were going to get done by 2035, it would be in the public planning stages now. Will it happen EVENTUALLY, though? Say, by 2065? Quite possibly. Robots will vastly increase the size of the labor force and they will work for free, making all sorts of thitherto impossible public works projects feasible. Giant dams, new subways, national mag-lev networks, huge bridges, demolitions of decrepit buildings, cleaning up toxic waste sites–all sorts of projects that we can’t do now thanks to inadequate time and money will be done in the future with cheap robot labor. At that point, the biggest stumbling block will be political resistance from people living in neighborhoods that don’t want the giant glass skyscraper going up next to them.

And robot labor won’t just make a difference at the level of big national projects–it will have a big impact on average people. While the house robots of 2035 will be clunky and limited in function, their counterparts in the second half of this century will have superhuman physical abilities and skills sets. They’ll eventually be able to do anything, from mowing your lawn to cooking your food to building an extension to your house. They’ll have a superior sense of aesthetics to you and will make intelligent recommendations about how to manage your household instead of only waiting for your orders. Just imagine a world where every lawn is mowed, every scrap of trash on the street is picked up, every house is spacious and resembles something from Better Homes and Gardens, and every household has a master chef and a 24/7 security guard in one. Imagine all of our infrastructure upgraded and the existing stock of crappy, old buildings being heavily upgraded or demolished and replaced with something of much higher quality. It would be a cleaner, prettier, more comfortable world and would represent a major increase to standards of living.

There will be crazy parking garages where cars are stored on giant, spinning racks. The fatal problem: if you had any loose stuff in your car (coins, papers, half-empty coffee travel mug), it would go flying all over the place and would end up all over the dashboard and windshield. In 2035, parking lots will still be “normal,” though most won’t have human attendants, and most will be suffering financially due to declining business.

In 2035, people in rich countries will commonly have autonomous cars, and instead of parking in an expensive lot close to their destination and then walking the final distance on foot, people will have their cars drop them off at the destination, and then drive off by themselves to park in the cheapest place within X miles and wait. This will destroy much of the private parking lot industry since the cars would be able to find the nearest free parking space, and then precisely time when they left the space to coincide with you exiting the front door of the place where it dropped you off. Something like a “sharing economy for parking spaces,” whereby private citizens would rent out empty spaces in their driveways and curbsides by the hour for very low rates (the whole process would be automated) would also be formidable competition for professionally-run parking garages. Such a business will become practical once the AIs driving cars and the AIs managing the patchwork of private parking spaces can talk to each other.

 

There will be no smartphones, tablets, or augmented/virtual reality glasses. The most advanced personal electronic devices people used in the movie were earbud-style cell phones. NO!!!

People will have natural-looking bionic arms that are better than normal arms. Halfway through the film, it is revealed that Will Smith’s left arm is actually a robotic prosthesis installed after his natural arm was severed in a car accident. It looks completely natural, blends into his body, apparently allows him to feel sensations, and has the full range of human motion. We find out it’s a robot arm when it gets damaged in a fight and sparks start flying out. I think this sort of technology is inevitable, but will come way later than 2035. The state-of-the-art in limb prosthetics in 2035 will be about the same as the state-of-the-art in robotics, which I described earlier as being slow and clumsy, but at least in the lower end of the human range.

There will be tiny hologram emitters. At the start of the film, when Will Smith first learns about the murder, he speaks to a hologram of the dead man. The human-sized hologram is produced by a small, pocket-sized device lying on the ground. It’s possible to make free-floating holograms (see my Prometheus review), but only with large machines and, probably, large amounts of energy. I doubt the technology will improve enough by 2035 to allow hologram emitters to be so small. Also, when the holographic man speaks, his speech seem to be coming from his holographic mouth instead of from the device lying on the ground, which is inaccurate.

Robots will have berserker emotions. The best-known scene in the film is probably where Sonny–the robot suspected of the murder–becomes so angry during his jailhouse interrogation that he slams his fists into the heavy metal table, denting it. Since emotions are merely the result of biochemical and bioelectric activity in the human brain, and since I believe that all aspects of the human brain and its functions can be ultimately simulated in computers, I think machines will eventually gain human emotions, and it’s entirely possible they could go through a period of their evolution when they had extreme human emotions like explosive anger or depression. But in the long run, it’s not going to make sense for them to be capable of emotions that override their logical thinking, make them threatening or untrustworthy, or debilitate them. A.I.’s will have a huge advantage of humans in that they will be able to edit their own mental “programming,” and I think they will wisely decide to inhibit or reduce certain emotions.

By 2035, machines will probably have passed the Turing Test, meaning they will be able to carry on free-form conversations with humans for minutes on end without making mistakes. However, they won’t actually be capable of intelligent thought and won’t be self-aware like humans are. Similarly, by the same year, I think machines will be able to sense the emotions of the humans around them with good accuracy and will be able to simulate their own emotions (through speech, mannerisms, or other actions) fairly convincingly. However, these will be mere simulations of emotions–machines will lack the inner experiences of things like happiness, anger, and fear.

Switching gears to shoehorn a random point into this note, let me return to something from earlier. While the world of 2035 will look very similar to the world today, and new technologies will mostly just be overlaid onto the existing infrastructure, I think in the longer run, free robot labor will enable us to REPLACE or radically upgrade our existing infrastructure. But does that mean every single building is going to turn into some kind of Borg-like structure that in terms of form and function will be unrecognizable to us today? Absolutely not. I’m thinking more along the lines of run-down houses and buildings being replaced with something you would today think of as luxurious and spacious. Living in a house you’d see in a style catalog today will become the new standard in the future. There wouldn’t be mile-high skycrapers everywhere, but ugly urban buildings and abandoned factories would disappear.

Will we all live in mansions? No, but none of us will be packed into tiny apartments or dwellings overloaded with people. How much extra utility do you really gain once your house grows beyond a certain size? Will we all have fleets of luxury vehicles? No, but then again, why does one person need more than one vehicle?

My broader point is that, even at the end of this century (and possibly beyond), many aspects of life and features of the built environment will be the same as today, we’ll discover there are some sensible limits to how much things can and should change, and we’ll find that technology can’t improve upon certain things. Here are some made-up examples of futurism falls victim to the “technology improves everything” fallacy and fails to consider the cost/benefit tradeoff of making things more high tech:

1. Instead of your desk being made out of wood, it will be made out of perfectly structured hard polymers impregnated with self-regenerating nanomachines that immediately fix even the smallest crack, and it will also be embedded with powerful computers.
   Why does the desk need all of that?
2. Instead of cleaning your dishes by putting them in a normal dishwasher that sprays them with soap and water, you will put them into a dishwasher that uses nanomachines and sound waves to clean them.
   Is there something wrong with soap and hot water? Are we constantly dealing with rotting food stuck to our plates, bowls and utensils because our current dishwashers aren’t advanced enough to wash them away?
3. Instead of you using a simple remote control to change channels on your TV, you will change the channels using arm and hand gestures that your TV will be able to see and understand.
   What’s so hard about pushing a button on a remote control? How does using physical gestures make things better or easier? 
4. (I read this in a sci-fi short story year ago) Instead of rubbing a bar of soap over your body in the shower, you will say “Lather” and your showerhead will spray soapy water onto you, and then you will say “Rinse” and it will only spray pure water onto you to wash off all the soap.
   In the future, only losers rub soap over their filthy bodies, I guess. 

Links

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/teslas-model-3-problems-highlight-expensive-battery-cost-2018-1