There’s a common theory that has threaded its way through books, movies and television shows for decades, says Gus Posey, and he’s out to dispel it.
Posey, the outreach education coordinator for The Museum of Flight in Seattle, says well-known stories such as “The Terminator” and “I, Robot” have given impressionable teenagers the idea that robots are here to take over the world. Nothing could be further from the truth, he told a handful of students at a March 10 event at the Puyallup Public Library.
In conjunction with a national initiative known as Teen Tech Week, the library partnered with The Museum of Flight to host a free-of-charge, interactive lesson on robotics. Much of the two-hour session gave students a chance to construct their own extraterrestrial rovers from a conglomeration of plastic parts, wires and battery packs.
The notion that robots will someday have the ability to manage human lives or even destroy mankind is something the teens in attendance were quite aware of.
“I’m not afraid of robots — I’m afraid of the possibilities of robots,” said Sean French, a 16-year-old Puyallup High School student.
Posey’s presentation gave a brief overview on the history of robots, which stretches back nearly 2,400 years to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who imagined a world in which tools accomplished their own tasks and removed the need for slavery. The timeline also includes several science-fiction fantasies: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and the modern-day classic “WALL-E.”
But robots also have a practical use that goes back several decades, Posey explained. The nation’s first commercial-grade computer, UNIVAC, was invented in 1951. General Motors factories began using robots on their assembly lines in the early 1960s. The first unmanned spacecrafts to land on Mars through the 1970s Viking program have morphed into more durable, advanced rovers in the past decade and the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled for launch in 2011.
“If we’re willing to invest compassion we can get compassion back from robots,” Posey said.
The Puyallup library is hosting other events this spring in connection with the museum, young adult librarian Bonnie Svitavsky said. The students who turned out for last week’s robotics lesson are frequent library users, she said, picking up a horde of science fiction novels and participating in weekly writing and Japanese animation programs.
“I’m always really excited when they’re willing to come in and sit through a presentation after doing a full day of school,” Svitavsky said.
Josh Bachman, a 17-year-old Puyallup High student, attended the robotics workshop and enjoys reading steampunk, a sub-genre of sci-fi that features steam-powered contraptions popularized by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.
“It would be cool if we had these robots that did my chores for me,” Bachman said.
Print
E-Mail