An Engineer's Nightmare: 102 Years of Critical Robotics

TL;DR

This paper explores the historical and artistic perspectives on robots, highlighting how artist-created robots challenge conventional views and suggesting their potential usefulness in human-robot interaction research.

Contribution

It provides a historical analysis of artistic representations of robots and proposes new directions for integrating these perspectives into HRI.

Findings

Artist-created robots offer critical insights into robot-human relationships.

Historical artistic depictions challenge traditional robot paradigms.

Potential applications of artistic robots in HRI development.

Abstract

A critical and re-configured HRI might look to the arts, where another history of robots has been unfolding since the Czech artist Karel Capek's critical robotic labor parable of 1921, in which the word robot was coined in its modern usage. This paper explores several vectors by which artist-created robots, both physical and imaginary, have offered pronounced contrasts to robots-as-usual, and offers directions as to how these more emancipated cousins might be useful to the field of HRI.