Opinion Aye Robot By David Parmer	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
アイ、ロボット いつのまにか生活の一部となったロボットたち。 受け入れ第一段階の今、人々は深く考えずにロボットを歓迎している。 だが、第二段階になり、ロボットが人間に取って代わりはじめたら…。

The first working robot that I ever saw was in 1995 at the Stanford University hospital in Palo Alto, California. It was about the size of a middle-school child, and it glided down the hallway past a shuffling cancer patient. When the robot reached the elevator, it admitted itself, and rode to the second floor, where it went about its business.

I think it was taking hard copy of medical records from one part of the hospital to another. No one seemed to give it any notice, and neither did I, except to mentally make a note. Perhaps the other people in the hospital were preoccupied, as was I, with more pressing matters.

And this is how technological change occurs, not in one giant wave, but drop by drop while our minds are preoccupied by other matters. If you want to get an immediate sense of this, go back and look at a film from the 1970s. No cell phones, no computers but electric typewriters, and no large-screen TVs. One by one, the devices we take for granted today entered our world and replaced those "antique" technologies of the 1970s.

In the same way robots are entering our world, one by one, drop by drop, and it seems we give them little notice. Hardly a week goes by when there isn't a picture in the newspaper of a new or improved robot, and we give them little or no notice. The humanoid robots we do see are given cute names (Aibo) and human-like features (Asimo) and are seen dancing, shaking hands, or climbing stairs. They are often shown at exhibitions with attractive young ladies or smiling execs in suits. In the land of cute, why shouldn't robots too be cute? Why indeed?

Because I think cute lets us not think about what the coming of the robots really means.

My complaint is not with robots, but with not thinking. When Steven Spielberg's film "A.I." opened here a few years ago, a local professor was quoted in the news as saying: "We must welcome robots into society." I wanted to tell him: "Wake UP! Time for some thinking." Robots, particularly humanoid robots, will have a profound effect on the way we live, work and organize our society.

In fact, the robots are already here. Phase One of their ongoing presence can be seen in the use of welding robots in factories, giant driverless dump trucks in mining, and robot drones used for surveillance and combat as well as countless other applications. At this stage they are doing the dangerous, dirty and backbreaking work.

But what will happen in Phase Two, when humanoid robots begin to take over human blue-collar jobs? What are we going to do with unemployed people when there are no blue-collar jobs left? Will we give them money to play pachinko all day long, or have 24-hour free J.League games with all-you-can-eat buffets? Will everyone be on welfare except the elite technocrats? And what happens when robots start taking over white-collar jobs?

These are questions that we have to start thinking about. And when I say "we" I mean you and me. The only tools we need are common sense and human logic.Two traits the robots don't have - yet. (543 words)