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Dawkins’s implication—through the use of words like ‘robot’ and ‘blindly’—that evolutionary theory favors determinism is utterly without foundation … A robot is a mindless automaton. Perhaps some animals are robots (we have no way of knowing); however, Dawkins is not referring to
some
animals, but to all animals and in this case specifically to human beings. Now, to paraphrase Stebbing, ‘robot’ can be opposed to ‘thinking being’ or it can be used figuratively to indicate a person who seems to act mechanically, but there is no common usage of language that provides a meaning for the word ‘robot’ in which it would make sense to say that all living things are robots [p. 41].
    The point of the passage from Stebbing which Symons paraphrased is the reasonable one that X is a useless word unless there are some things that are not X. If everything is a robot, then the word robot doesn’t mean anything useful. But the word robot has other associations, and rigid inflexibility was not the association I was thinking of. A robot is a programmed machine, and an important thing about programming is that it is distinct from, and done in advance of, performance of the behaviour itself. A computer isprogrammed to perform the behaviour of calculating square roots, or playing chess. The relationship between a chess-playing computer and the person who programmed it is not obvious, and is open to misunderstanding. It might be thought that the programmer watches the progress of the game and gives instructions to the computer move by move. In fact, however, the programming is finished before the game begins. The programmer tries to anticipate contingencies, and builds in conditional instructions of great complexity, but once the game begins he has to keep his hands off. He is not allowed to give the computer any new hints during the course of the game. If he did he would not be programming but performing, and his entry would be disqualified from the tournament. In the work criticized by Symons, I made extensive use of the analogy of computer chess in order to explain the point that genes do not control behaviour directly in the sense of interfering in its performance. They only control behaviour in the sense of programming the machine in
advance
of performance. It was this association with the word robot that I wanted to invoke, not the association with mindless inflexibility.
    As for the mindless inflexibility association itself, it could have been justified in the days when the acme of automation was the rod and cam control system of a marine engine, and Kipling wrote ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’:
    From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God—Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’-rod.
    John Calvin might ha’ forged the same—
    But that was 1893 and the heyday of steam. We are now well embarked on the golden age of electronics. If machines ever had associations with rigid inflexibility—and I accept that they had—it is high time they lived them down. Computer programs have now been written that play chess to International Master standard (Levy 1978), that converse and reason in correct and indefinitely complex grammatical English (Winograd 1972), that create elegant and aesthetically satisfying new proofs of mathematical theorems (Hofstadter 1979), that compose music and diagnose illness; and the pace of progress in the field shows no sign of slowing down (Evans 1979). The advanced programming field known as artificial intelligence is in a buoyant, confident state (Boden 1977). Few who have studied it would now bet against computer programs beating the strongest Grand Masters at chess within the next 10 years. From being synonymous in the popular mind with a moronically undeviating, jerky-limbed zombie, ‘robot’ will one day become a byword for flexibility and rapid intelligence.
    Unfortunately I jumped the gun a little in the passage quoted. When I wrote it I had just returned from an