Robots: artificial slavery or artificial welfare
Robots are not a recent invention. The first robot was made nine centuries ago in the Tigris Valley, not in Silicon Valley. And the word robot itself goes back 100 years. It was first used by the Czech writer Karl Čapek in his 1921 play. In the Czech language, it refers to hard work and slavery.
There is agreement that the Czech playwright Karl Chapek was the first to use the word robot, as this word appeared in 1921 in his play “Rossum’s Robot”. But this does not mean that the first appearance of the robot was after the use of this word, but rather the history of robots goes back much further. The twelfth century AD may be the time when robots appeared.
Making tricks
If the mention of Syria was associated with the birth of the personal computer at the hands of Musab Abdel Fattah al-Jandali, a Syrian of origin from Homs governorate who was born in San Francisco and was offered by his parents for adoption, so that the world would later know him as Steve Jobs, then the name Syria is also associated with the name of the first inventor of the robot; Badi Al-Zaman Abu Al-Ezz bin Ismail bin Al-Razzaz Al-Jazari, who lived in the twelfth century AD and is considered one of the greatest engineers and inventors in history.
Al-Jazari was born in the area of Ibn Omar Island, which is located in northern Syria on the outskirts of the Tigris River, an area inhabited by Kurds, and he was known to be fluent in speaking three languages: Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish. He wrote his books in Arabic. He worked as chief engineer in Diyarbakir (Amed), where he was sponsored by the princes of Bani Artaq, and entered the service of their kings for twenty-five years. During this period, he designed many machines of great importance, many of which were not known before. Among them are water-lifting machines, water clocks with a self-stimulating system, diversion valves, self-control systems, and many others, which he explained in his illustrated book entitled “The Combine between Science and Useful Action in the Industry of Tricks.”
And Al-Jazari was the first to invent a robot programmed to carry out a specific task, when Amir Artaq asked him to make a machine for him that would relieve him of the servants whenever he wanted to perform ablution. When the time for prayer comes, the bird whistles, then the robotic servant steps towards the prince and pours
He should have water from the jug, and when he finished his ablution, he would give him the towel, then he would return to his place while the bird was singing.
Syria forgot Al-Jazari, just as it forgot Musab Abdel-Fattah Al-Jandali, but the Czechs did not forget their playwright Chapek, and took advantage of the centenary of the first performance of his play with a theatrical performance, but this time written by a robot.
Last March, the play was presented online and titled “Artificial Intelligence: When a Robot Writes a Play.” Its events are narrated by a robot, who is the main character in the play after he decided to go out into the world to get to know society and human emotions, and even to get to know death.
The 60-minute play was written by OpenAI's GPT-2 language generator and produced by researchers from Charles University in the Czech Republic.
Bad dream
A report published in the journal Science, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, indicated that the researchers provided the GPT-2 model with an opening of only two sentences of dialogue, after which it produced up to a thousand word, and then repeat the process to produce the complete play.
The robot, the protagonist of the play, finds himself alone after the death of his master, Victor, and that he has to deal with the human race alone. If only he was in a bad dream,” according to the description of the British Guardian newspaper.
The researchers believe that the play, which was presented in the Czech language, with English subtitles, does not, of course, live up to the level of William Shakespeare's plays. Sometimes events and dialogues deviate from their logical sequence, and sometimes “artificial intelligence forgets that the main character is a robot and not a human being,” and “it may turn a male into a female in the middle of a dialogue,” says Rudolph Rosa, a computational linguist at Charles University.
This is because the model does not really understand the meaning of the sentences it writes, but rather collects the words that are used together, one by one. The greater the number of words, the negative impact on the coherence of the texts it produces. So the researchers divided the play into eight scenes, each less than 5 minutes long, rather than letting the model write the entire play at once. The dialogue was also limited to only two characters in each scene of the play.
The researchers also changed the text in some passages; To correct errors in the gender of characters or in cases of repeated speech. However, Rosa, who co-supervised the project, explains that 90 percent of the final text was left untouched, and that human intervention did not exceed 10 percent.
It will take about 15 years for the technology to write complex and coherent text, like plays, from start to finish,” predicts Chad Dechant, an artificial intelligence expert at Columbia University. However, he believes that "the experiment was wonderful and shows what artificial intelligence can do now, and it was able to excite people."
After showing the play, without an audience present, the team supervising the experiment allowed it to be shown online for a few days. The team pledged to show it again at the Šavanda Theater in the Czech capital, Prague, when the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic allow.
Chapek addressed in his play the idea of reaching a creative robot who could become a master of nature, warning against scientific progress that could lead to the destruction of humanity.
