Robots: the Century Past and the Century Ahead
Federico Pigozzi

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 -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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSpace Science and Extraterrestrial Life
