As civilization proceeds in the direction of technology, it passes the point of supplying all the basic essentials of life-food, shelter, clothes, and warmth. Then we are faced with a choice between using technology to provide and fulfil needs which have hitherto been regarded as unnecessary or, on the other hand, using technology to reduce the number of hours of work which a man must do in order to earn a given standard of living. In other words, we either raise our standard of living above that necessary for comfort and happiness or we leave it at this level and work shorter hours. I shall take it as axiomatic that mankind has, by that time, chosen the latter alternative. Men will be working shorter and shorter hours in their paid employment. It follows that the housewife will also expect to be able to have more leisure in her life without lowering her standard of living. It also follows that human domestic servants wi1l have comp1ete1y ceased to exist. Yet the great majority of the housewives will wish to be relieved completely from the routine operations of the home such as scrubbing the floors or the bath or the cooker, or washing the clothes or washing up, or dusting or sweeping, or making beds.

By far the most logical step to relieve the housewife of routine, is to provide a robot slave which can be trained to the requirements of a particular home and can be programmed to carry out half a dozen or more standard operations(for example, scrubbing, sweeping and dusting washing up, laying tables, making beds),when so switched by the housewife. It will be a machine having no more emotions than a car, but having a memory for instructions and a limited degree of instructed or built-in adaptability according to the positions in which it finds various types of objects.It will operate other more specialized machines, for example, the vacuum cleaners or clothes washing machine.

There are no problems in the production of such a domestic robot to which we do not have already the glimmering of a solution.

When I have discussed this kind of device with housewives, some 90 per cent of them have the immediate reaction, ‘ How soon can I buy one?' The other l0 per cent have the reaction, ‘ I would be terrified to have it moving about my house '-- but when one explains to them that it could be switched off or unplugged or stopped without the slightest difficulty, or made to go and put itself away in a cupboard at any time, they quickly realize that it is a highly desirable object. In my own home we have found that, at first, the washing-up machine was regarded as a rival to the worker at the kitchen sink, but now there is no greater pleasure than to go to bed in the evening and know that the washing up is being done downstairs after one is asleep. Some families would be delighted, no doubt, to have the robot slave doing all the downstairs housework after they were in bed at night, while others would prefer to have it done in the mornings, but this would be entirely a matter of choice.

It is impossible to predict in detail the shape and mechanism of the robot slave. It might carry its computer and response mechanism around with it and also its source of power or it might operate with a computer stored in a cupboard under the stairs and the signals and information proceeding along a cable, which also carries the power from the mains, through the machine moving about the house. In this case it would unwind its cable as it went to a given room and wind it up again when it went back and put itself away under the stairs. It might carry its power, for example, by storage batteries, and have its instructions beamed to it by short-wave short-range electromagnetic waves. The machine would have to be able to move about in a house designed for human beings and would therefore probably have to go through a normal door, open such a door and close it, and walk up and down stairs or over irregularities on the floor. It will not look at all like a human being, but rather like a box with one large eye at the top, two arms, three hands, and a pair of long narrow pads on each side to support and move itself with.

The problem of making the machine respond to the presence of objects in different places such as the foot of the staircase has already been solved, in partial prototypes. The chief difficulty is undoubtedly the coordination of hand and eye-for example, to teach the machine to distinguish between a knife and a fork and to lay them on opposite sides of the place at the table. However it is true that the fundamental problem of distinguishing between objects of different shapes by a computer has already been partially solved and published, and therefore there is no basic problem in this. When one considers the immense change in the size and reliability of computers and all other electronic devices that has taken place, it is clear that computers for doing this type of control of movement according to sense impressions will certainly be available.

Preliminary work on the design of suitable walking and stair-climbing mechanisms has already shown that there are no major problems in this field, and the de- sign of arms with the necessary degrees of freedom and of hands both for picking up objects and for gripping and rotating an object indefinitely in either direction is well advanced. Storage batteries or directly fuelled ceils will certainly be well enough developed to provide, say, l KW for l hour with a weight of 20 1b or so.

Basically, applied science starts with the clear understanding of a human need and then uses a1l the available scientific knowledge to assist in the achievement and satisfaction of this need. Helping the housewife by eliminating the routine operation is the outstanding human need in the developed countries that calls for solution

The only problem is whether a sufficient number of applied and decide to work for the achievement of this need and will have obtained the necessary financial backing we can expect to see,  first, the development of a robot for some purpose where money is no object, such as for rescuing people from burning houses or aeroplanes or putting out oil-well fires.

-----摘自《英语精读文选》安徽科技出版社