May the Fourth Be With You All: A Tribute to Robots

When people ask me about my fandom, I describe it as such: I majored in Star Trek, and minored in Star Wars.

Star Wars, however, came first. The year was 1981. We had cable. I think it was specifically Showtime that was at the time showing Star Wars: A New Hope almost daily, and we watched it daily. It was then that my love for robots started and developed, all over R2-D2 and C-3PO.

I was at the same time naïve and realistic. On the one hand, I understood that these were actors and that Hollywood magic made these robots come alive on the screen. But on the other hand, I convinced myself that when I grew up, I would be CEO and President of my own company (I aimed high) that would build robots like these, in particular the C-3PO kind that could walk around our house, speak our language, and help us (so not entirely like C-3PO, but if you merged the uber-helpful parts of R2-D2’s brain into C-3PO’s body.).

(There was one catch—we’d operate and manufacture on the Moon. That’s a whole different tangent to this story for another day.)

The pre-internet 80s were a difficult time for a kid interested in this kind of technology. I was limited to my local library and the handful of adults in my life. I was reasonably fortunate—I was one of the first people I know to learn how to program a computer: a TI-944 and my first language was BASIC. But while I hungered for more, there was no one who could guide me. My Dad was an engineer and knew some rudimentary BASIC and FORTRAN, and was the one who brought home the TI-944 in about 1982 and an IBM 8088 in 1984, that was the limit of what he could provide. The local library had few books. My elementary school had nothing.

I was in an enrichment program in 1984-85 that included a segment on robotics, but that, too, was limiting. The program exposed me to an AI-like program called ELIZA, and it fascinated me to no end, but no one could tell me how it worked, so I couldn’t build my own. I hadn’t ever heard the term “natural language processing” and wouldn’t for another two decades. We focused more on the physical aspects of robots, putting together robotic kits—something I remember being fantastic at because I had teeny tiny fingers.

As the years went on, my professional interests and career took me into the space industry, so very far from my initial dreams (the part about living/working on the Moon seemed more tangible). Although outside of my day job, I eventually learned a few things about AI, taking part in Turing Test-like contest called the Loebner Prize (I even took second place one year and my name exists on Wikipedia because of it) and when I earned my master’s degree, the focus was on AI and Machine Learning (ML).

So the love of robots has always been and still is there. I’ll explain in a future post how that love merges with my day job: Satellites are essentially a version of robots in space.

And I owe it all to Star Wars and the very lovable R2-D2 and C-3PO. May the Fourth be with you always!