Robots, humans and Rajni

While intelligent machines infiltrate our lives and pop culture, let's take a second to contemplate the dangers of AI domin-.... Nah! Let's drool over the prospect of Rajni's upcoming Enthiran-2

October 19, 2015 06:09 pm | Updated 07:18 pm IST

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On Friday, there was a certain news nugget that ought to have broken the Internet, at least in India. Strangely, it didn’t. It was about (no,not Kim Whatshername) the grapevine that Arnold Schwarzenegger had agreed to star in director Shankar’s sequel Enthiran-2 that is set to feature Superstar Rajnikanth in the lead.

 

IF this is true and IF Shankar manages to find a producer for a film that will have to devote more than half of its budget as salary to these two men, it will be the biggest coup in the history of Indian cinema. Whether the producers will recoup such an investment is a mind-numbing question. Unless of course, some Hollywood studio agrees to produce the movie, which would then put it in a completely different league.

That apart, this is not the first time Rajni and Arnold will be associated in a movie.

Flashback to the biggest cult hit in Rajni’s career, Baasha . Did you know that a segment of Baasha 's theme music happens to be a shameless rip-off from Arnold’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day! Listen for yourself...

For millions — okay, let’s just say thousands — of Indians, Terminator-2 symbolised what Robot movies were all about. The movie was released at a time when cable television was just beginning to make its way in to peoples homes in India. I still remember how a subscription fee of Rs. 40 per month was a big deal in the early 90s. The television set we had at home had just eight channels. And you could customise eight channels into those eight buttons on the TV. To watch anything else, we had to tune the additional button that was meant for an ‘S-band’. Oh! The difficulty of it all!

On this scorching summer afternoon, during our annual holidays, Terminator was set to be screened on Star Movies. My friends and I were ready half an hour before the movie began; all the windows were closed, the blinds were drawn and once the film started we all just went quiet with the TV volume at its maximum, absolutely in awe!

It still remains my favourite robot movie of all time. Not that I have watched many overall. I still detest the later additions to the Terminator franchise.

Also, one of the daily routines that I had as a school kid was watching the hilarious television series Small Wonder every evening. The story of a girl robot, VICI (Voice Input Child Identicant, stylised as Vicki), who lives with a normal family, and her interactions with the people around her are one of the most memorable parts of my childhood. There was an episode where Vicki's human brother Jamie wonders if she could cry. The little girl robot then shows off her crying skills and makes water spurt from her eyes!

In fact, when Apple launched its iWatch earlier this year, I was reminded of the television series Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot , in which Sokko would use his watch to summon his ‘Giant Robot’, stationed far away, to come to his aid whenever humankind needed saving.

Imagine using a watch to summon a robot! The day this becomes possible might not be too far off, if some technologists are to be believed.

The term ‘Robot’ was first said to have been used by Czech writer Karel Capek, in his 1920 play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots), in which a robot kills the man who invented it. In the 1980s, late Tamil writer, S. Rangarajan, more famously known by his pen name ‘Sujatha’, wrote En Iniya Enthira (My dear Machine/Robot), a story of a small robotic dog. Sujatha was considered way ahead of his times in his writings, someone who could predict the future of technology.

This fascination, especially among the Japanese, for machines being able to perform the work of humans, has led to the evolution of robots, in terms of the functionalities they are being endowed with. The Japanese have developed robots that can read people’s emotions and even hug people.

 

Closer home, there is a growing threat of >robots and machines taking over the work of journalists . If — like Associated Press has already begun doing — a robot can autodial, pose questions like a reporter, record the answers and algorithmically churn out copy, then all us scribes had better turn in for our twilight years.

More recently, the University of Leeds announced it would spend £4.2 million to develop robots that can repair potholes and street lights.

 

Many would say fears of robots replacing humans are ill-founded. But the fear is palpable. Especially, when humanoid robots are tuned to talk, read emotions and ‘live with humans’. There is growing unease over the role robots play in human lives, with robots possibly being used for sex. Malaysia recently banned an international conference on ‘Love and Sex with Robots’. Aldebaran, a SoftBank Group company, which developed ‘Pepper’, a humanoid android robot, has inserted a clause in its sale agreement with buyers that they cannot use these robots for sexual purposes or any other ‘indecent behaviour’.

 

In the movie Enthiran , Rajni’s robot develops feelings for his fiancée, played by Aishwarya Rai, and embarks on a path of destruction to get the woman. Somehow, this seems to be slowly becoming a reality. How far can the human race go in making robots a part of our everyday lives is a question that we will need to ponder.

In fact, earlier this year, nearly 20,000 people — including Prof.Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Noam Chomsky, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics researchers — signed an open letter to prevent the misuse of AI.

In Enthiran , Rajni’s scientist character talks about AI and developing his robot for use in the Army to prevent the loss of human soldier lives. It is exactly this point that many scientists are worried about — the fact that AI could spur a machine war, machines that cannot distinguish the good from the bad and would just as blindly follow tyrannical orders as sensible ones.

“If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” the letter said.

However, the one thing that will keep robots and humanoid robots off limits for a majority of the human population in the world is the cost of owning one, although some robots are available for as low as $1,600.

But for now, just bring on Rajni and Arnold, in their robotic avatars!

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