Robots: The 500-year Quest to Make Machines Human

Cornell University - arXiv, 2022

Let us reflect on the state of robotics. This year marks the 101-st anniversary of R.U.R. [2], a play by the writer KarelČapek, often credited with introducing the word "robot". The word used to refer to feudal forced labourers in Slavic languages. Indeed, it points to one key characteristic of robotic systems: they are mere slaves, have no rights, and execute our wills instruction by instruction, without asking anything in return. The relationship with us humans is commensalism; in biology, commensalism subsists between two symbiotic species when one species benefits from it (robots boost productivity for humans), while the other species neither benefits nor is harmed (can you really argue that robots benefit from simply functioning?). We then distinguish robots from "living machines", that is, machines infused with life. If living machines should ever become a reality, we would need to shift our relationship with them from commensalism to mutualism. The distinction is not subtle: we experience it every day with domesticated animals, that exchange serfdom for forage and protection. This is because life has evolved to resist any attempt at enslaving it; it is stubborn. In the path towards living machines, let us ask: what has been achieved by robotics in the last 100 years? What is left to accomplish in the next 100 years? For us, the answers boil down to three words: juice, need (or death), and embodiment, as we shall see in the following.

Social and cultural studies of robots and AI, 2022

This opening chapter describes how the problem of “bad robots” may not be solved by making robots seem more human. We may be living with robots, automated vehicles, and other AI-related entities that many of us perceive to be “dark” and “creepy” for many years to come. Some of these dark traits are the result of designers’ decisions, such as the manners in which certain robots apparently elicit fear on the part of some humans. Others are part of the co-production efforts of their users, such as in the way that a legally-available sex robot can often be modified to become a creepy and malicious child sex robot. The possibility that humans will have a low social place in relation to robots relates to another of the major themes of this book, that of efforts to construe robots as “outclassing” humans in substantial ways. The combination of robots often acting in rogue or unpredictable ways and humans themselves as feeling significantly outclassed signals critical social and economic problems for societies.

Alternate Routes, 2020

Artificial Life and Robotics, 2009

The development of robot art ment. This is probably because robotics incorporates within itself a few charming, practical, and intellectual issues that are able to elicit the interest and curiosity of many philosophers, artists, scientists, technologists, and, overall, ordinary people.

eWIC - British Computer Society, 2018

In this article, I aim to accentuate the importance of the cultural imagination about robots, observing it 'as a mixed register of fantasy and an actual practice' (Kakoudaki 2007, 165). I emphasise the field of robotic art, which, I argue, is in a fluid state of exchange with other areas of robotic research, equally benefiting from the larger context of the cultural imagination about robots. Furthermore, I discuss artworks that offer ​valuable commentary on robots even though they are not defined as robotic art in a narrow sense (Penny 2013), given that they feature only the representation of robots or robot-like characters. Nevertheless, these artworks contribute to the circulation of symbolic registers that revolve around the multifaceted figure of a robot.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2012

Robots are becoming an important part of the “new social technology” defined by Hirai [1], where finding a robot in any environment is becoming more common. While we are used to finding robots in different environments such as supermarkets, nurseries (e.g., robotic pets), hospitals (e.g., for surgery), or at home (e.g., vacuuming robots), the environment that still has the most robots is industry (e.g., the automotive industry). For that reason, many studies are required to find the appropriate mechanisms to integrate robots at all levels of our society. We must consider issues from many perspectives, such as history, literature, economics, culture, technological developments, electronics, computers, or industry. The conclusions obtained will help us achieve the most positive and beneficial integration of robots with humans.

The archeology of robots reveals a robotic creature as an object traversing spaces and time; humanoid robots are nostalgic objects. Robots emerged yesterday; they have history. Will robots be with us tomorrow? And if yes, then is what form? What functions would they have? Are they going to be humanoid? Donna Haraway's (1991) reading of cyborg was one of the interpretations which facilitated the discussion around the question where the division between the human and the non-human, alive and dead, animate and inanimate, lies. Where the division is situated now, in the anthropocene eschatologies. These distinctions are transgressed every day. Humans are fascinated with phones, which create the affect of interconnectedness with the world but simultaneously alienate us from what might be called "real" experiences of presence. Humans interact with robots and in these interactions perhaps become more cyborgian themselves.

2009

The contribution sketches the emergence of the present days robotic art as the result and reflection of activities in fields of art creativity and science fiction (both literature and cinematography) in the first half of the previous century, and the convergence of art and scientific and technical development mainly during the second half of the 20 Century.

HMMM, 2000

Recent robotics is the result of a large historical tradition dating back from Antiquity and based on still older religious beliefs. We will here give some important landmarks in this tradition, starting from Antiquity, going through the Middle Age and up to the 60's.

2017

Preface: The increasing deployment of robotic technology in many domains of human life will have a substantial impact on the economic, social and cultural tissues of our societies. Though one can already anticipate some of its huge benefits, it also urges us to try to reflect on its impact on fundamental instances of everyday life and also envisage to what extent essential societal values on which we have based our cultures and legal systems may be eventually affected.