This robot will shoot you and steal your wife

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Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis, the host of Politics Now, the ABC's podcast unpacking the latest political news when it happens.

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G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening.
So our last episode was all about humanoid robots and how far away we actually are from having them in our homes.

Pretty much every story we came across in the archive revealed that for as long as we've had robots, I should say quote-unquote robots, they've ostensibly just been expensive puppets, operated more often than not by grifters of some kind.

Currently, the robots being manufactured by companies like Onex and Tesla kind of fit into this weird puppet narrative too.

The CEOs are talking a big game about what the future of live-in robot butlers could look like, but at this stage, the butlers that they're selling are really still just operated by a guy behind a curtain.

I've got my supervising producer, Cara Jensen-McKinnon, here, who spent some time this week looking into even more robot stories.

She's got a really good one about a robot called Alpha, and we'll also be answering some questions that people have sent through since we put the episode out. G'day, Cara.
Hello.

Can I just say that since doing this story, my Instagram discovery page has become like this delightful delightful reel of just robots that are dancing and falling over.

And it's a real nice change of pace for me. That is nice, as opposed to, you know, Epstein stuff and

Gaza stuff. Yeah.
Looking forward to getting to people's emails later on, but let's start by talking about Alpha. Who is Alpha or what is Alpha?

So I have discovered this robot called Alpha, which was a robot that was created in the 30s in the UK by a guy called Harry May.

And this seems to be one of the kind of key origin stories for killer robots, basically, as a concept that has captured the imagination of people.

So the story kind of starts in 1932 in Brighton in England, where this inventor, Harry May, is showing off this robot called Alpha that he's invented.

And the robot looks like, basically, when you close your eyes and think of a robot, that's what the robot looks like. But let me just send you a picture.
Oh, okay.

I'm kind of looking at what I would describe as a chrome Ned Kelly. Quite a scary-looking, imposing, brightly polished silver torso and legs.
Are they legs, or is that a sort of a cone-shaped?

He's got legs, he sits on a chair, he's kind of

seated legs. He's seated.
Arms that look very much like C-3BO's arms, but a head that looks like a trash can. Yes.
With are those like sieves sticking out of his face for eyes?

Yeah, so he's kind of, I guess you would say customizable in a lot of ways. So unclear if it's a he or a she, but the robot has a head plate that can change.

So it can either have like a smooth head or the robot can have like curly metal hair, which is quite cute.

The robot also has a chest plate that can be changed between a smooth chest or it can have boobs. Okay.
Small metal boobs.

Which

the guy that invented this robot, this is what they're looking for. Customizing the chest, customizing the haircut.

So the robot, when it was displayed to these people in Brighton, it had kind of a list of tasks that it could kind of run through. So one of which is it could sit there and read a newspaper.

Yeah, you've sent me a picture of it sitting and reading the newspaper. And

I have to say,

what this now looks like is like a chrome-plated Homer Simpson sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper. Like, that is a very toilet pose, I have to say.
Also, is it holding a gun?

Well, this is what I'm about to get to. So,

because in addition to having a customizable chest and reading a newspaper, the other thing it was programmed to do was shoot a gun.

And that, as you can imagine,

backfired. And so I have an article here from the 1932 Ogden Standard Examiner about what happened when the robot was given a gun.

Seemingly more man than machine, and without a word from its inventor, the robot rose to its feet. May commanded the two-ton robot to sit, but instead it took a step forward.

As the machine slowly raised its pistol,

women in the audience screamed and Ben shouted warnings to the inventor. May commanded the robot to stop.
Drop that gun and sit down, he screamed, to no effect.

Naturally, the inventor rose his hand to defend himself. Alpha the robot squeezed the trigger, and in one quick violet moment, the discharge bullet pierced flesh and shattered the bones in May's hand.

The robot stood motionless, its arm outstretched with the smoking gun. May's voice could be heard, again desperately attempting to command the robot.
Back to your chair, Alpha, and drop that gun.

As a doctor tended to May,

the inventor calmly explained, I always had a feeling that Alpha would turn on me someday, but this is the first time he ever disobeyed my commands.

I can't understand why he fired before I gave the proper signal. What?

I have approximately 70,000 questions, Cara. Just if I ask.
Please. Now, this article kicked off this idea that robots could just become sentient, I guess, at any point and start capping their makers.

This is like a full-on Frankenstein's monster kind of thing. Exactly.

And it actually was referred to as Frankenstein's monster at the time. And I've kind of looked into this and it actually didn't happen in that way.

What really happened was that the gun kind of malfunctioned and blew up in the robot's hand and Harry May, the inventor, just happened to be standing there and his hand was hurt in the explosion.

So it wasn't that the robot became sentient. It was basically just a malfunction of the gun.
But the truth doesn't matter because everyone picked up the story and ran with it.

And then as a result of this happening, you had kind of this stream of articles coming out basically characterizing robots as something that would just, one, steal women, despite the fact that they could be customized to be women themselves, and also fight men.

and win. All right.
This article is Jack Dempsey, who was the former boxing world champion. He says, I can whip any mechanical robot that ever has or ever will be made.

Maybe that sounds a bit egotistical, he says. Maybe you will say it's just the voice of a has-been, but I assure you that neither is true.

Interesting. Okay, that's the first one.
The second one is a robot is. Well, it's a cartoon, obviously, but a robot appears to be...

non-consensually putting its hands on a maid. Yes.
So there was this kind of narrative, robots were going to come into our lives and take our wives, yeah. Take our wives and our maids.

And as a result of this, Harry May basically, this robot alpha became so famous that he went on tour in the US two years later and showed the robot at a Macy's department store, which I have a video of.

But first, here's an article of Time magazine at the time, which was written in a really beautiful way, but it ends in an odd way. If you could just read it out for me.

Encased from head to foot in chromium-plated steel armor, Alpha sat on a specially constructed dais with its cumbrous feet securely bolted to the floor, stared impassively over the knot of news hawks and store officials waiting for the first demonstration.

The creature had a great sullen sillit of a mouth, vast protuberant eyes, shaggy curls of rolled metal.

Professor May, a dapper blonde, beak-nosed man in his mid-thirties, signalled his assistant who drew a curtain behind the stage, revealing the massive control cabinets to which the robot was wired.

Said the crisp British voice of Professor May, Wake up! The eyes of the automaton glowed red. Stand up.
The robot clicked and whirred, pivoting at knees and waist. It slowly stood up.
Raise your arm.

Alpha gave a tremendous, Nazi salute.

Okay.

Okay. Okay.
Okay, Cara. Yeah.
So who knows what the ideology of Alpha has become in the last couple of years since it was invented? What year is this? Sorry, Segimonis? Importantly, 1934. Yeah, okay.

So. It certainly wasn't great to be doing Nazi salutes.
It wasn't great, but it was a slightly different time. A couple of years later,

Alpha would have been cancelled, but it was more popular at the time, in 1934, to be doing that. There was quite a significant American Nazi movement at the time.

There was open debate in American society about whether, you know, fascism and Nazism had a role to play in American society. Exactly.

So despite the Nazi salute and the fact that this robot has already shot May once, the robot was given a gun again. Oh, good.

And I've got a video

for you to watch. Oh my goodness, I'm so excited about this.
You'll also see that the robot at this point has breasts and curly hair. It looks more like a barrister's wig than hair.
Yes.

The video to start with says, The face of things to come. Meet Alpha the robot, constructed entirely of metal, but controlled only by the voice.

Raise your right arm.

Fire!

My goodness, okay.

It's firing its gun. It also shoots like a little earlier than you expect.
So that bullet probably went into the Macy's department store. That's just gone off into the shirts.

Yeah, into the children's toys section, you know. And so the robot basically works by voice-activated commands.

But no, no, it doesn't. It doesn't really work by me.
That's what Harry May said. That's how he said it worked.

Okay, this is what, okay, because I was going to say, I'm happy to tell you what's really happening here. I'm pretty sure I can figure it out.
But anyway, go on.

He had like a chat back and forth with the robot. How much do you weigh?

And the thing I think that I appreciate most about robots from this time and through the next couple of decades is that they were funny. Yeah, yeah.

They were programmed to tell jokes, which I appreciate.

They were not programmed to do anything.

They had jokes built into them. They said that they had programmed to build jokes.
That's true, that's true. Okay, let's go, let's go.
So they were shooting guns and telling jokes.

So here's some jokes. Tell me, do you like little boys?

Nah. Okay, well, that's encouraging to hear that.
Do you like little girls?

See, well,

do you like the ladies?

Oh, he likes the ladies.

Oh, okay, so they've brought up a young woman. I can't tell if she's in on this or not, or if she's just a person who found themselves in Macy's and is about to get shot.

Shot by a robot.

Okay, let's see.

Are you married? She says? Not yet.

Would you like to be married? Would you like to be married? Yeah.

What sort of ladies do you like? What sort of ladies do you like?

He prefers blondes. She's not blonde.
She has brown hair. Alpha, are you just turning your head to the left and look at that very pretty branette there? Wouldn't you like to marry that young lady?

She'll do. Okay, so it's mean as well.
It's cruel. This was just one of the many shows that Alpha did across America.

I'm using quote fingers here, but automatically responding to questions that were asked by people in the audience. Sure.

In reality, it just had basically a voice box inside of it that could be activated and only had so many responses that it could give. But nobody seemed to understand that.

This was kind of one of the first times that people had even seen a robot at all. Even the word robot had only existed for about 10 years.
And so it was an entirely new kind of concept.

And this notion that robots were going to be shooting people and also marrying blondes and also taking our jobs and that sort of thing played into the fear that people had during the Great Depression, which was happening at this time, where so many Americans were losing their jobs.

I think the unemployment rate at the time that this robot visited Macy's was 25% in the US. So 13 million people are out of work.

And now this robot's arrived that he's going to marry your wife and take your job. And maybe shoot you.
Take your job of loosing bullets in a department store. That's right.

That was a big employer in the post-depression era. Exactly.
And there were so many more articles written.

Here's an article that I've got as well from many years later in 1936, which is still spinning the same story about this robot kind of entering department stores and just shooting people.

It's got a picture of a robot just straight up shooting someone.

It feels very

reminiscent of still the feeling that we have now about the robots, you know, the Optimus robots that Elon Musk is inventing and the 1X robots.

We have this kind of strange fear about them eventually taking our jobs that we seem to have always had, but it's never actually eventuated. But this seems to be where the whole thing kicked off.

Okay. Yeah.

I mean, there's a person in there, right? No, it seemed to be that there were wax cylinders with recorded messages on them that could be activated with a a button.

It would activate the next sound that had been recorded. It only had so many answers.
Yeah, but it's standing up and it's like shooting a gun and stuff. Well, it isn't even standing up.

It's just sitting on the even the standing part is fake. It's always just sitting on a chair.
Oh, right. It doesn't actually stand up.
No, no.

So the fact that it can stand and fight is entirely just a fabrication of newspapers. It was always ever sitting down, reading a newspaper, or shooting its gun.

And whenever it didn't answer the question correctly, the reason would be not that it was pre-recorded and it only had so many messages, but just that it didn't respond to the voices of women or men with different accents to Harry May.

So it was a misogynist

robot with odd attitudes towards guns and you're slightly concerned that its creator might be a Nazi. That's right.
What an unusual time to live in. A time similar to now, you might say.

You might say. Okay, so look, look, obviously we've put out a call out for your questions and comments about robots and we've had some good ones.

The first is a lot of people are drawing our attention to the mechanical Turk.

I actually did study the mechanical Turk at university, so I feel equipped to talk about the mechanical Turk was allegedly a chess playing robot man dressed in traditional Turkish dress.

He was sitting behind a big table and there was a chess sport on the table and anyone could sit down opposite the mechanical Turk and play a game of chess and this is in the 18th century so this is obviously an insane thing that could happen but it was later revealed that within the table was a person kind of hunched in looking at the chessboard via a kind of series of mirrors and was able to move the mechanical turk's arm to win any chess game.

I mean to be fair that person needed to be good at chess. To be fair also like still cool to have a system of mirrors and a mechanical arm that can move around also and play chess.

Like it's still pretty impressive. But then that notion of the mechanical turk was later adopted by Jeff Bezos.

at Amazon and they have something called the M-Turk, which is the ability to use hidden human labor.

So while they had a guy that was like shunted into a box that played chess via mirrors, Amazon has people that when a computer can't do a a task efficiently, they have a person kind of step in and do it.

So they call it artificial, artificial intelligence.

That's how the mechanical Turk has kind of stuck around. But yes, that is one of the kind of first ideas of an autonomous robot, I suppose, that was acting and tricking people.

Yes, and the mechanical Turk, it played games against incredibly famous people like, you know, Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin and stuff. Yeah, it was very, very, very impressive.

I love that there is sort of a wood-cut drawing of how the mechanical Turk apparently worked. Yes.

And the man underneath the mechanical Turk in the drawing is like fully dressed as an aristocratic man with

a powdered wig and a fancy coat on. I am pulling a trick on everybody, and I am actually secretly sitting underneath the table and doing a trick, but I'm not going to do this dressed

anything less than

looking like I could meet the king. I mean, I'm playing Napoleon.
I need to be fully dressed.

I guess the thing is, there's a difference between you going, it's very impressive how they've pulled off this trick. That's kind of the difference, I suppose, between a magician and a scammer.
Yes.

A magician is going, we all know this is a trick. Correct.
You can't necessarily figure out how I'm doing it, but we're all in agreement that there is a trick happening here.

And I think that is...

probably what was going on with, you know, we were talking about Miss Honeywell, and Miss Honeywell was clearly just a woman dressed in sort of a robotic sort of costume, stepping out of a cabinet and making robot movements.

My favorite thing about Miss Honeywell, by the way, is that Miss Honeywell was a person acting like a robot before the robot dance had been invented.

Exactly. And so it's a really like dodgy-looking robot.

And like before you had any sort of pop-and-lock moves, she's sort of walking around stiff-armed like someone who's in a full-body cast, trying to walk across the room. It's quite funny.

But like that was to a certain extent. Everyone was sort of allowed to be in on the fact that it was kind of a trick.
And people would ask, is this a trick? And the guy would go, oh,

what do you think? Do you think it's a trick?

Whereas you have other people who are going, oh, no, no, no, this isn't a trick at all. I'm going to be shipping Klaytu robots within the next 18 months, I'm sure.
Exactly.

And that's kind of the way I see what's going on at the moment.

The robots that are being made by these big tech companies, which are able to dance and able to you know prance about the room and do pre-programmed activities

the the idea that these things are going to be able to be put in people's homes soon I just I don't know One more email we should mention before we go. Do you want to read it, Cara?

Yes, this is from Renna Pavey.

She says, if men put one tiny fraction of the effort into housework that they have into ridiculous robots that don't actually achieve anything with the possible exception of $2,000 vacuum cleaners.

Perhaps we still wouldn't be fighting about the domestic burden on women, the gender pay gap, toxic masculinity, and so on. Absolutely agree.

Preach. Preach.

Excellent email, Brennan. Very good.
Correct. I have now spent a couple of weeks talking about robots that I could have been spending mowing my lawn, which definitely needs to be mowed.

So maybe I could do that instead.

Cara, thank you so much. Very interesting.
Thank you.

I'll see you on Thursday. Of course, we're doing an episode that is going to be about what on earth is going on in Venezuela.

Not so much from the is America about to invade perspective, but how did a country that has so many resources available to it manage to end up in a 10-year spectacular economic crisis and on the verge of governmental collapse?

That is what we're going to be talking about on Thursday. Here on, if you're listening.
See you then.