Bookplanet: "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"

If Robots Ever Get Too Smart, He'll Know How to Stop Them – by CORNELIA DEAN

In the movie "I, Robot," robots rise up against humanity. In the classic sci-fi thriller "Blade Runner," a bounty hunter must exterminate intelligent androids that are both deadly and very unhappy with their creators.

Even in 1920, when the playwright Karel Capek gave English speakers the Czech word "robot" (laborer) in his play "R.U.R.," the androids at Rossum's Universal Robots were bent on wiping out the human race.

"If popular culture has taught us anything," Daniel H. Wilson says, "it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace." Luckily, Dr. Wilson is just the guy to help us do it.

In his new book, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising," Dr. Wilson offers detailed — and hilariously deadpan — advice on evading hostile swarms of robot insects (don't try to fight — "loss of an individual robot is inconsequential to the swarm"); outsmarting your "smart" house (be suspicious if the house suggests you test the microwave by putting your head in it); escaping unmanned ground vehicles (drive in circles — they'll have a harder time tracking you); and surviving hand-to-hand combat with a humanoid (smear yourself with mud to disguise your distinctive human thermal signature and go for the "eyes" — its cameras).

If all else fails, reasoning with a robot may work, Dr. Wilson says, but emotional appeals will fall on deaf sensors.

Should you prevail, he offers in a grim addendum: "Have no mercy. Your enemy doesn't."

But he is no foe of robots, Dr. Wilson said in a telephone interview from Portland, Ore., where he is living while he waits for Paramount to decide whether to make a sci-fi comedy out of the book, which it has optioned.

A native of Tulsa, Okla., he earned his doctorate in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, a major center for research in the field, just as his book ( robotuprising.com ) was coming out late last year.

And his thesis describes a version of the smart house, a dwelling so rich in sensors that it would monitor people's activities and raise an alarm if their movements changed or stopped. He said he was inspired to investigate the possibilities of such "assisted intelligent environments" by his mother, a nurse who organizes care for elderly people who want to remain in their own homes — or "age in place," as Dr. Wilson put it.

Unlike Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who has written on the robot menace, he does not view robotics as contributing to what Mr. Joy called "the further perfection of pure evil."

In fact, he said, he wrote the book out of annoyance with the way the popular media portrayed robots. "I was kind of tired of them getting a bad rap," he said. "In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing."

So he decided to mine popular culture — science fiction books and movies, even "R.U.R." — for scenarios of robot uprisings. Then he talked to researchers around the world about how plausible they might be, and about the state of robot technology generally. He found them "surprisingly eager to put themselves into these made-up situations."

But if the scenarios are outlandish (so far) the information is real. By the time readers have absorbed all the possible technological advances rebellious robots could exploit, they have taken a tour of the world's robotics labs, where, Dr. Wilson maintains, all of the techniques and tools in the book already exist or are under development.

For example, he recalled, when he asked his adviser at Carnegie Mellon, Chris Atkeson, how large a walking robot could be, the question provoked a lively discussion in the lab, ending with a consensus that they could probably be no taller than a telephone pole. The next question was, "How would you take one down?"

Actually, making walking robots fall down is one current focus for Dr. Atkeson, whose voice acquires a comically sinister edge as he describes the humanoids in his lab. One goal of the work is to understand what happens when people, particularly older people, fall. "Right now we are trying to make robots fall down the same way people do," he said. "We can very reliably get our robots to fall down; like people do is a little harder."

Contributions from leading roboticists elsewhere in the world also found their way into the book. For example, Dr. Wilson said, foiling speech recognition can be as simple as altering one's accent, or capitalizing on background noise — problems actual robot researchers are striving now to overcome. So the anti-robot tactics the book recommends boil down to exploiting current weaknesses in robot design, Dr. Wilson said.

"If you read between the lines you can see all the advice is where researchers are working very hard," he said.

When Dr. Wilson started writing the book, he was still a graduate student. "Initially it made me nervous," Dr. Atkeson said, in part because he feared other researchers would not respect anyone who took such a zany approach to his work and then presented it to a popular audience. Dr. Wilson himself said he feared some readers might not get the joke.

"But the book turned out very nicely," Dr. Atkeson said. People will pick it up because it is funny — "and then you have an opportunity to educate them. It's a robotics primer."

In any event, Dr. Wilson is hardly heeding his own warnings. In fact, he is looking for a job in commercial robotics research. He is also working on a second book, tentatively titled "Where's My Jetpack?" about various technological marvels that were proposed with great fanfare but never panned out.

And in his own life, he said, he does not feel too threatened by robots. "If you want to worry about something, worry about humans," said Dr. Wilson, who is 27 and single. "Humans are much more dangerous."

Meanwhile, though, robots continue their march toward world domination. Just last week a troop of them, produced by "an art robotic collective" called Botmatrix, took up residence in a downtown theater in the play "Heddatron," in which they kidnap an Ypsilanti, Mich., housewife and force her to perform Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler."

As Dr. Miller put it in his book: "You probably found 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising' in the humor section. Let's just hope that is where it belongs."