{"id":40499,"date":"2017-10-27T15:56:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-27T14:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=40499"},"modified":"2017-11-03T17:44:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T16:44:36","slug":"jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-automata-androids-replicants-and-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2017\/10\/27\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-automata-androids-replicants-and-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Automata, androids, replicants, and robots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-32935\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson-223x300.jpg\" alt=\"jeffrey_aronson\" width=\"112\" height=\"151\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson-223x300.jpg 223w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2014\/12\/jeffrey_aronson.jpg 446w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 112px) 100vw, 112px\" \/><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The words automaton, android, replicant, and robot refer to pretty much the same thing. The word automaton (Greek \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03cc\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bd, a marionette), describing a device that moves by virtue of a concealed mechanism, entered English at the start of the 17<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">th<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century and was applied to instruments such as clocks, clockwork toys, and mechanisms designed to mimic human beings. It was later used to describe a human being who resembled an automaton, and then, at the start of the 20th century, came to be synonymous with humanoid robots and androids.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The word \u201crobot\u201d, from a Czech word for forced labour or drudgery, robota, was invented by Karel \u0108apek in 1920 for his play RUR, or <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rossumovi Univerz\u00e1ln\u00ed Roboti<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> (<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rossum\u2019s Universal Robots<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">; Figure 1); rozum in Czech means sense, reason, understanding, intelligence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-40502 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/10\/jeff_a_fig2_oct27-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"571\" height=\"318\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/10\/jeff_a_fig2_oct27-1.jpg 571w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/10\/jeff_a_fig2_oct27-1-300x167.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 571px) 100vw, 571px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Figure 1<\/strong>. <em>A scene from an early production of RUR<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">An android is an automaton that physically resembles a human being. That it comes from the Greek word \u1f00\u03bd\u1f75\u03c1<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> a man, seems not to have been seized on by feminists as a sexist slur, perhaps because the female robot in Fritz Lang\u2019s film <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Metropolis<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> (1927) heads a long line of male and female movie androids of varying degrees of intelligence and ability. Androids also feature in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blade Runner 2049<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, recently released, only 35 years after the cult movie <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blade Runner<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. The critics and cult fans have given it rave reviews, although some might find the sight of Ryan Gosling wandering across desolate tracts with a vacant expression on his face for two and three-quarter hours merely boring. The two films, based on Philip K Dick\u2019s sci-fi novel <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> (1968), feature androids of both sexes, known in the book as andys; the screenwriter Hampton Fancher invented the term replicants for the movie. Both films raise the question of what distinguishes humans from machines, biological intelligence from artificial.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Various fictions feature different distinctions between humans and androids. In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, for instance, the android Data, constantly seeking to be more like his human co-workers, does so by, among other things, trying to cultivate a sense of humour.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Dick\u2019s novel empathy is the key: the replicants lack it, while the humans use an empathy box to be put in touch, both mentally and physically, with the religion of the day and its messiah, Wilbur Mercer. The Voigt\u2013Kampff (in the movie, Voight\u2013Kampff) test, which androids fail, tests empathy through physiological differences. But were empathy detected in that way, it would be easy to install the specific effects in an android, as when Star Trek\u2019s Data has an emotion chip installed in his positronic brain. This is also reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s recent <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2017\/oct\/25\/empathy-virtual-reality-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-puerto-rico?CMP=twt_a-science_b-gdnscience\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">assertion<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that virtual reality cultivates empathy\u2014a good selling point perhaps for his empathy machines.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have previously <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2016\/10\/21\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-empathy-fact-and-fiction\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">suggested<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that true empathy in humans is impossible; it implies that one person\u2019s brain is capable of being in the same state, anatomically and functionally, as another\u2019s\u2014a sort of replicative empathy, which is clearly impossible. Even if <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/24775147\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">mirror neurons<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> were capable of inducing some sort of fragmentary simulacrum of this, more would be needed to claim that that is empathy. This could imaginably happen if two people shared an experience. I may think that I can evoke experiential empathy when you describe your attacks of migraine, although even then they are almost certainly different from the attacks that I suffer. But what I think is usually the clinical manifestation of empathy, which I have called impressionistic empathy, could be simulated by an android and is what I believe is detected by patients who consider a practitioner to be empathic. The features of impressionistic empathy, as listed in the Consultation And Relational Empathy (CARE) <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/15528286\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">questionnaire<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, include listening, explaining clearly, showing care and interest, and helping the patient to plan and take control, all aspects of good medical practice that I was taught as a medical student. We would do better to talk about cultivating <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2016\/10\/28\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-empathy-and-compassion\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">compassion<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Incidentally, the title <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blade Runner<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> has a medical connection. Ridley Scott took it for the film of Dick\u2019s book from the title of a novella by William S Burroughs, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blade Runner (a movie)<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. He in turn took it from a novel by Alan E Nourse, called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bladerunner<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Nourse\u2019s novel is about an overpopulated healthcare system in which only those who have been sterilized qualify for medical care; to offer it to others is a crime. The bladerunner of the title is a young boy called Billy Gimp who illegally provides surgical instruments to a surgeon who is willing to operate on those who are denied care by the system: \u201cAt least the Doc had got away\u2014no telling what the cops would have done to him for taking out a kid\u2019s tonsils!\u201d The time line is shown in Figure 2.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-40501 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/10\/jeff_a_fig2_oct27.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"662\" height=\"453\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/10\/jeff_a_fig2_oct27.jpg 662w, https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/10\/jeff_a_fig2_oct27-300x205.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 662px) 100vw, 662px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Figure 2<\/strong>. <em>The timeline of appearance of the books and films mentioned in the text; three versions of Blade Runner are shown: the original (1982), The Director\u2019s Cut (1992), and The Final Cut (2007; regarded by some as the definitive version)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Jeffrey Aronson<\/strong>\u00a0is a clinical pharmacologist, working in the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford&#8217;s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He is also president emeritus of the British Pharmacological Society.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Competing interests:<\/strong>\u00a0None declared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The words automaton, android, replicant, and robot refer to pretty much the same thing. The word automaton (Greek \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03cc\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bd, a marionette), describing a device that moves by virtue of a [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2017\/10\/27\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-automata-androids-replicants-and-robots\/\">More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5762],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jeff-aronsons-words"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . 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The word automaton (Greek \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03cc\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03bd, a marionette), describing a device that moves by virtue of a [...]More...","og_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2017\/10\/27\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-automata-androids-replicants-and-robots\/","og_site_name":"The BMJ","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/bmjdotcom\/","article_published_time":"2017-10-27T14:56:03+00:00","article_modified_time":"2017-11-03T16:44:36+00:00","og_image":[{"width":540,"height":350,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/02\/Jeffrey-Aronson.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"BMJ","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@bmj_latest","twitter_site":"@bmj_latest","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"BMJ","Est. reading time":"4 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2017\/10\/27\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-automata-androids-replicants-and-robots\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2017\/10\/27\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-automata-androids-replicants-and-robots\/"},"author":{"name":"BMJ","@id":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/#\/schema\/person\/ba3da426ed20e8f1d933ca367d8216fe"},"headline":"Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . 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