Our topic today is robotics, but a lot of the books you’ve chosen are science fiction. I wondered how much of what they describe is in the future, or how much is already happening? 

The answer is always, ‘More than you think is happening right now.’ Also, there is no more avid reader of science fiction than the person who is making it come true. Every roboticist that I’ve ever met has some sort of vision of the future that they’re trying to make come true, and it’s always been affected by science fiction. 

Tell me about your first choice, a short story dating from 1953 called Second Variety by Philip K Dick. 

Second Variety is… OK, have you ever seen The Terminator? You know that part at the very beginning – it’s this apocalyptic future and there are these humanoid cyborgs with red glowing eyes marching over a field of human skulls, spraying everything down with these Gatling guns, and the humans are being chased around like rats? Then of course it cuts to Los Angeles and you’re thinking ‘Damn! I wanted to see that movie.’ Well this is that movie. Second Variety is what I just described almost exactly. I don’t know the complete provenance, but there is no way that Second Variety didn’t have some impact on the whole Terminator world. 

The story is primarily concerned with, ‘How do you tell a human from a robot?’ But what I found most interesting about it was that it was an apocalyptic future, in which human beings had built machines not to kill other human beings, but to learn how to kill other human beings. The robots initially were just landmines, they were very simple things. They learned how to camouflage themselves, and then human beings became more scarce and smarter, so the robots actually had to begin to learn how to mimic us. What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. That’s just a really, really cool concept to me; it’s a powerful message. 

In terms of robotics, given the plethora of futuristic horror stories involving human look-alike robots, is there any value in concentrating on android development? Or will humans always mistrust and spurn robots too accurately in our image? 

Whether or not roboticists should put effort into making incredibly humanlike robots called androids is a topic of debate among scientists. On the one side, you can argue that you’re never going to be able to hit this target: there’s this uncanny valley and you’re always just going to fall into it and creep people out. The uncanny valley is this phenomenon ­– a psychological phenomenon that’s been demonstrated experimentally – that shows human beings get really scared by objects that look almost like human beings, but not quite. And it really bears out intuitively. If you think about zombies – that’s a human being, almost entirely, the only thing that’s wrong is that they’re staggering around, the gait is wrong, they’re not breathing. From a robotics perspective, these are all little things off on the margins. From a distance, zombies look like people, they walk around. But it’s not good enough. There’s an argument that this is a fundamental human reaction that is never going to change. You’re never going to get used to it. 

On the other side, there are a lot of really good reasons to have androids. Human beings are designed to interact with other human beings. We very quickly, as children, learn how to recognise speech, other people’s emotions, their gestures, what’s going on in their heads. We are experts at figuring out what other people are thinking. And if you make a machine that looks like another person, then you’ve created the most natural interface possible, and therefore a machine that is optimally interacting with other people – as long as you’re not scaring the shit out of them! That’s a little bump in the road there for people who are designing androids. 

My feeling is that this is research that absolutely should be done, and yes it’s challenging, but never say never – there are a lot of benefits associated with having androids around. 

On to Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. This was first published in 1959 and it’s about a soldier in a futuristic military, who gets involved in an interstellar war between mankind and the bugs… 

This is a story of war in the future with advanced weaponry against aliens. This story is so grounded, and so realistic – the way that the characters interact, their language, their lingo, the way the military is set up, the way they utilise their weaponry – everything is just pitch perfect. When you read it, you pretty quickly find – at least I did – that you aren’t worried that it is science fiction. I was thinking, ‘This is just so real, these are soldiers, and this could be Spartans fighting shoulder to shoulder – this could be a war that had occurred at any time.’ It’s just human soldiers fighting together, dying together, and that’s really what I took away from this – not the technology, or the crazy sci-fi aspects, and certainly not the political overtones. The politics are not my favourite part about this book, although Heinlein fans might have a different perspective. 

What really is great about this book to me is that all the science fiction just dissipates in the face of absolute veracity. And that’s something that I think if you’re writing this kind of stuff, you should aspire to.