Robots in Hats

Note: The following is a post I made for my Facebook page, Robots in Hats, and is obviously less serious than some of my other posts.

You might find yourself asking, why put robots in hats?  To answer this, first we must ask, why bother with robots at all?

Of course, robots are great at a number of tasks.  We already use them for repetitive industrial tasks or extremely dangerous situations, but the potential applications are far from exhausted.  From minimum wage fastfood preparation where apathetic teens can't be bothered to accurately position cheese on a sandwich to dangerous mines where human lives are still risked daily, our society would benefit greatly from automation.

At first there is a concern about putting people out of work, and although I could pass this off as the nature of progress--for it surely is--the efficiency of pervasive robotic production would eventually lower the cost of living substantially, reducing the number of households with multiple jobs, thus allowing the natural unemployment rate to rise without compromising our standard of living.

Of course, there will still be jobs.  Most obviously, there will be a sharp increase in robot-related jobs: design, programming, maintenance, etc.  Moreover, much of the public would still prefer human-to-human interaction (and, to be fair, our capabilities of computational linguistics and speech recognition are severely lacking).  Many jobs in human relations should be created, allowing for a smooth transition into a robot-rich society and simply facilitating comfort amongst our fellow men.

In fact, this shift towards jobs where the primary requirements are communication skills and kindness would necessitate the nurturing of such skills within our own people, improving the nature of society as a whole.  Even those not immediately employed as such will benefit through empathy and imitation as well as the more apparent reward of never having to deal with frustrated sandwichsmiths during their day-to-day.

So, why put robots in hats?  Simply hiring smiling faces to tell you to ignore the robot behind the curtain will not be enough to integrate them into our society.  There will be robots out amongst people, whether delivering food (within a restaurant or across a city), cleaning messes, or otherwise diligently doing their duties where they can be seen.  At first this may seem acceptable, and to most it would be.  But there are those among our society who would have problems with this.  There are many who, through misunderstanding, would not be accepting of the robots.  There are others who understand perhaps too well that robots are not people, and the likelihood of vandalism against autonomous machines operating amongst people would be disturbingly high.

As such, it is necessary to create the illusion that robots are both friendly and relatable.  Most efforts to this end so far have been to make them more human, but as we progressed, we discovered the Valley of the Uncanny.  If you've ever seen one of those Japanese robots made to look and act like a human and found them to be somewhat off-putting if not downright creepy, then you're already familiar with the Valley of the Uncanny if not by name.  Yet there's a bizarre polarity to the behavior of the human brain: things that are obviously not human we have a tendency to attribute human qualities to, be they abstract personification of actions or motivations or the interpretation as a human visage--In the Man in the Moon we see a face where there is none, for instance.  Yet the more human something becomes, the more we scrutinize it, and contrarily, the more we are readily aware of what makes something not human, the more comfortable we are accepting that fact while letting it flirt with the idea of humanity.  Therefore, something that is almost human but not quite often appears to us less human than something only slightly human but obviously not.

Many of the biggest successes of relatable robots have been in entertainment, not academia or industry, and often it only takes a few suggestions of personification: a couple arms and a couple eyes is enough in the case of Wall-E, where the shape of his eye casings as they rotate slightly additionally serves to suggest the eyebrows that gave Johnny 5 much of his personality.  And although such mechanisms would be sufficient in most cases, twin cameras and fully articulated grasping arms are not necessary on most robots and would instead be costly over-engineering, and if you try to convince an engineer to add such things simply to make the robot "relatable" or "friendly", he would probably scoff before quietly contemplating why his eyes and hands didn't make him either of those things.

Yet a hat can be worn by any robot.  It doesn't need a discernible head; just something that can under the wildest of stretches be assumed as mildly head-like.  It's headishness need not determine the appropriateness of a hat; the hat will make it a head.  The hat can be adhered by whatever means necessary, and if the robot is manipulating molten metals, operating within active volcanoes, or otherwise partaking of tasks that might be less than friendly to the typical hat, then give it a hat of metal.  No one will care.  It might even appear more appropriate.

Take note that the type of hat is crucial.  A modern helmet does more to make a person look like a robot than the other way around, and a Viking helmet might not exactly be the symbol of friendliness we seek.  A ball cap could help humanize a robot, but otherwise it is entirely boring.  It seems evident that the best hat would be formal in nature, whether a top hat, bowler, fedora, or otherwise.  It not only helps us identify with the robot, it makes the robot seem dignified to be doing its job.  Also, robots in top hats are hilarious.