Robots: the Century Past and the Century Ahead

TL;DR

This paper reflects on a century of robotics, contrasting its history with future prospects, emphasizing the evolution from servitude to potential mutualistic relationships with living machines.

Contribution

It offers a philosophical and historical perspective on robotics, highlighting key distinctions and future challenges in developing living machines and evolving human-robot relationships.

Findings

Robotics has historically been about servitude and efficiency.

The future may involve robots with life-like qualities and mutualistic relationships.

Key challenges include achieving embodiment and life-like attributes in machines.

Abstract

Let us reflect on the state of robotics. This year marks the $101$-st anniversary of R.U.R., a play by the writer Karel \v{C}apek, 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.