-by Jesse de Pagter

When discussing the history of humans fantasizing about robots, one can go as far back as ancient civilizations and find stories that involve automatic, artificial beings. For instance, as classicist historian Adrienne Mayor describes it, Greek mythology was already exploring ideas about the creation of artificial life, including ethical questions about what she terms "biotechne" or "life through craft". A prominent figure that is often mentioned in this context is Daedalus, a master craftsman (and father of Icarus). Daedalus invented Talos, a large automaton made out of bronze, defending Crete against naval attackers by throwing large stones at them. Another example is the god Hephaestus, who built automata that approximate the present-day android. Also, many automata from other ancient civilizations can be mentioned here.

If we jump to the more recent history of robotics, it is interesting to remark that the very word “robot” originates from a 1921 science fiction play, Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.). Its storyline fulfills many of the associations that are still so present in our narratives about robots today: In the play, robots are developed in order to work for humans, but eventually, they rebel and make the human race go extinct. Like many preceding as well as succeeding stories in which automata play a prominent role, it expresses a wide variety of hopes, fears and other speculations about autonomous artificial beings. This has remained like that up until today: robots are abundantly present in many of the stories we consume.

Interestingly, during the last century, different kinds of actual, functioning robots have been gradually implemented into our society, from factory robots to robotic surgery to tests with robots as assistants in shopping malls. Robotic futures are certainly no longer just imaginations and yearnings that purely belong to the realm of deliberately speculative science fiction scenarios. In fact, with the current developments in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, computer vision and material science, new forms of automation are expected to enter ever more domains of our economy and society. This also means that we are increasingly likely to have interactions with robots.

For many people who engage in such interactions, robotic artifacts represent fascinating pieces of engineering, not in the least, because they are often perceived as technological artifacts that bear a certain similarity to humans. Many of us tend to have anthropomorphic reflexes and tendencies when talking about robots, looking at robots, or interacting with robots. This anthropomorphization of technology can also be related to many fears, from fear of replacement at our jobs to worries about intelligent artificial beings going rogue and causing dystopian scenarios. It should, therefore, not be a surprise that there is currently a strong public engagement with the societal impact of robots. An important part of this engagement is the voices arguing that we need to think about the way machinic beings with unprecedented degrees of autonomy can function in our society. That is to say, we need to examine rigorously how robots will affect our social lives, our economy, our democracy, how we understand our interactions with them and many other questions.

Combining these narratives of societal impact and interactive enticement, robots are often perceived as a type of technology that has so much transformative potential that many of us are simultaneously excited and scared about — they represent an existential risk to ourselves and our society. As someone who has been involved with robots from a perspective of the social sciences and philosophy for more than eight years, this was always an important issue that drove my curiosity. For me, it represented one of the most clear examples of the tension that emerges between speculative fantasies and socioeconomic reality. Where can one draw the line between the "real" implementation of robots and the "speculations" about automata? I wanted to understand this tension and — if possible — use these insights to influence the culture we establish around robots in order to craft a more responsible future with robots. As such, I was interested in understanding the narratives around them, the stories and myths they evoke, the technologies behind them, and, crucially, finding better ways to anticipate the contingencies that lie ahead.

During the last 4.5 years, most of my activities in this regard took place in the context of a PhD at the Technical University of Vienna in the interdisciplinary setting of a program called “Trust in Robots”. This setting provided me with the possibility of close interaction with a wide range of different roboticists. Very early in the process, I realized that many roboticists like to emphasize their field as the very opposite of a profession that is engaged with the speculative futures that many of us tend to associate with robots. Time and time again, the roboticists that I met and collaborated with claimed that the robots they were working on were relatively ‘boring’ and that technological progress in robotics was most likely going to be much more incremental than the broader public anticipated. In short, robots were not going to do anything exciting soon. Some people I worked with sometimes even expressed their problem with the term “robot” and tended to argue that the robots they were working on should be called differently. Within the relatively rigid structures of academic research, I was often bound to work with a reality in which speculations were playing a minor role.

Towards the end of this PhD trajectory, I was very excited to be invited as a co-curator at Improper Walls and get the privilege to help build up this exhibition from the very start, as it very much represented the possibility of synthesizing the tension between speculation and reality. Precisely in a time when autonomous beings are put under a magnifying glass, I strongly believe we need to collectively practice how we can engage with robots responsibly. In simple terms, when trying to establish desirable futures, we indeed cannot always only be speculative. In that regard, I am very much on the side of the above-mentioned roboticists. However, I also think we do need to find new ways of charting and anticipating future contingencies around these technologies. The exhibition was an attempt at doing exactly that.

We aimed to facilitate encounters with robots and robotic technologies in order to spark new understandings regarding the roles autonomous technologies play in our societies, as well as the ways they might empower us to achieve equal, sustainable, and desirable futures. As such, the exhibition invested in efforts to combine different perspectives on robotic technologies and use them to envision how we understand ourselves and our relation to autonomous beings.

Jesse de Pagter has a background in history, philosophy and the social sciences. In his work, he aims to study the way values define technologies and vice versa. Since 2018, he has been working as a PhD candidate in the Trust in Robots doctoral college at the Technical University of Vienna. In this context, he has been involved with the question of how ethics and other value-based approaches can be more deeply embedded in the field of robotics. He is currently a researcher at the Centre for Social Innovation, where he continues to address issues that engage with the relationship between technology and society.

AUTOPOIETIC ENCOUNTERS: EXPLORING OUR OBSESSIONS WITH BORING, REBELLIOUS MACHINES