DOI: 10.1145/2398356.2398358
Vinton G. Cerf
What’s a Robot?

I am a big science fiction fan and robots have played a major role in some of my favorite speculative universes. The prototypical robot story came in the form of a play by Karel Čapek called “R.U.R.” that stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Written in the 1920s, it envisaged android-like robots that were sentient and were created to serve humans. “Robot” came from the Russian word “работать” (“rabotat,” which means “work”). Needless to say, the story does not come out well for the humans. In a more benign and very complex scenario, Isaac Asimov created a universe in which robots with “positronic” brains serve humans and are barred by the Three Laws of Robotics from harming humans:

expands differentially causing a circuit to be closed or opened depending on the ambient temperature.

I would like to posit, however, that the notion of robot could usefully be expanded to include programs that perform functions, ingest input and produce output that has a perceptible effect. A weak notion along these lines might be simulations in which the real world remains unaffected. A more compelling example might be high-frequency stock trading systems whose actions have very real-world consequences in the financial sector. While nothing physical happens, real-world accounts are impacted and, in some cases, serious consequences emerge if the programs go out of control leading to rapid market excursions. Some market meltdowns have been attributed to large numbers of high-frequency trading programs all reacting in similar ways to inputs leading to rapid upward or downward motion of the stock market.

Following this line of reasoning,
one might conclude that we should
treat as robots any programs that can
have real-world, if not physical, ef-
fect. I am not quite sure where I am
heading with this except to suggest
that those of us who live in and par-
ticipate in creation of software-based
“universes” might wisely give thought
to the potential impact that our soft-
ware might have on the real world.
Establishing a sense of professional
responsibility in the computing com-
munity might lead to increased safety
and reliability of software products
and services. This is not to suggest
that today’s programmers are some-
how irresponsible but I suspect that
we are not uniformly cognizant of the
side effects of great dependence on
software products and services that
seems to increase daily.

Vinton G. Cerf, ACM PReSIDeNT