Month: October 2022

If you happened to be hanging around the Czech Republic town of Hradec Králové in 1921, and you happened to go to the theatre, you might have seen a play called “Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti” **or, in English “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Karel Capek, the writer of this play, coined the term robot to describe artificial people built to serve humans.

If you happened to be hanging around Paolo Alto in California a hundred and one years later, and you happened to stroll into the office’s of Tesla, you might have seen the unveiling of the unimaginatively named humanoid robot, Optimus. Optimus has a head, torso, two arms and two legs. It walks, squats, picks things up, climbs stairs. Tesla’s goal is “to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible”. But why make a humanoid robot?

Robots have been used in manufacturing since the 1960’s, but they aren’t humanoid. They are single arms built to perform specific tasks. What makes humanoid robots different is the idea of being ‘general purpose’. General purpose technologies always have a huge and lasting effect on an economy and entire society. Electricity is a general purpose technology. So are computers. You don’t have one computer designed specifically for typing and another for browsing the internet. Economists Lipsey and Carlaw suggest that there have only been 24 technologies in the history of humanity that can be classified as true General Purpose Technologies. Will humanoid robots become the 25th?

MIT professor and director at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Diana Rus, isn’t convinced. She says, “the more you generalize, the less you optimize,” which is why so many robots that we have today do not take human shape. Tesla wants to change that. So, when Musk says, “it really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it”, he’s referring to making robots that can do lots of different things. A single robot that can interact with all kinds of different scenarios, perform all kinds of different tasks, would undoubtedly transform civilization. But maybe not in the way Musk suggests.

In Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robots revolt and kill all the humans. This is the nightmare scenario that has been depicted in science fiction ever since, and I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, but I think something else might happen first.

If we build humanoid robots that look and move like an able-bodied man, then we reinforce designing society around that single physical form.

As robots become more able to lift heavier things, more things will be packaged into boxes that people can’t lift. As robots become better at walking up steps, more buildings will be designed with more steps that people can’t access. As robots become able to cross roads by detecting vehicles, fewer roads will have visual and audible crossing signals that help people cross safely.

In this future, we gradually become more and more reliant on the robots, not because we’ve become lazy and complacent, but because we’ve designed our society to work for them and not for all of us in all the various shapes, sizes and abilities we come in. And those who cannot afford a robot to perform tasks humans can’t become excluded all together.

We make society less and less accessible, less and less equal, when we design around one way of being and doing.