The New Apprentice

ISYAMA — Transmissions from The Apex

By Dr. Leo R. Yamas

A new worker has started at a factory in Belgium. The factory makes trays, cups and cutlery for airline meals and catering.

The new worker is slow. Someone has to watch it. It is expected to work on its own by the middle of next year.

That is ordinary for a trainee. The trainee is not ordinary.

It is a humanoid robot, built roughly in the shape of a person. Belgian television says it is the first of its kind on a factory floor in that country.

Today's Exhibit: The Trainee With A Deadline. Or: Why The Future Always Arrives As A Beginner.

For years, people have told each other that robots like this are decades away. It is easy to see why.

The robots in films arrive finished. Someone switches them on, and they understand everything at once. By the second scene, they have saved the factory or replaced everyone in it.

Nothing like that has happened. The conclusion seemed safe.

But that was the wrong thing to watch for. New machines almost never arrive finished. They arrive as beginners. And a beginner is easy to dismiss.

The first motor cars on British roads needed a person walking in front of each one. The law required it. In towns, they were not allowed to go faster than two miles an hour. People laughed, with good reason. A generation later, the streets belonged to the cars.

The beginner stage is the part you can see right now. It is easy to mistake it for the whole story.

Look instead at how a trainee like this one learns.

Robots of this kind usually learn by demonstration. A person does a task many times, and the robot copies it. Sometimes the person steers the robot's arms from a distance, so the machine can record the right movement.

Somebody, then, is spending this autumn showing a machine how a job is done. Things like where to hold a stack of trays so it does not slide, or which carton always sticks. Nobody ever wrote those tricks down. A person picks them up in a week.

Last month I wrote about the bottom rung: the dull, early work where every trade used to train its newcomers. That rung is disappearing for people. Here it is again, on a factory floor in Belgium, with somebody standing on it.

The bill I described then was simple. Someone has to pay for the months in which a newcomer costs more than it produces. Many employers have decided they cannot afford that anymore.

So the bill can still be paid. It is simply easier, this year, to pay it for a machine.

The gate to our lower garden hangs a little crooked, about four degrees. I hung it myself in our first spring on Isyama, before I trusted the Sprocklets with anything. The salt air here eats hinges, so they have rehung it three times since. Each time, it has come out exactly as crooked as mine.

Selene was picking beans beside it when I mentioned this. I said I had never asked them to copy my mistake.

"You told them how to hang a gate," she said. "They learned how you hang a gate."

Then she handed me the basket.

That is what deserves attention in Belgium. A trainee does not only learn the instructions. It learns the person giving them: their care, their shortcuts, the corners they cut at the end of a long shift. By next summer, the robot will carry the habits of whoever stood beside it this autumn. Machines tend to share what they learn. Those habits will not stay in one factory.

In your own work, the newcomer is more likely to be software than a figure with two arms. It will be clumsy at first. You will be tempted to laugh at it, or to ignore it until it is finished.

Do neither. The clumsy months are the only time you get to be its teacher. Show it the careful way, even on the days when the quick way would do.

Whatever it does when nobody is watching, it learned while somebody was.

— Dr. L.R.Y.

Transmitted from The Apex. Isyama. Sent from the lower garden. The gate is still four degrees off true. The Sprocklets read this once. They have never needed to be shown anything twice.