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Where Are the Robots?

The predicted arrival of robots depicted in movies for half a century never happened

Jun 20, 2007 16:15 GMT  ·  By
A 1950s magazine presenting conceptions on a possible future
   A 1950s magazine presenting conceptions on a possible future

Robots have been part of human imagination for longer than you think. Though the modern science-fiction literary genre has made them so famous that they've become universal brands, like "Robocop", "Terminator", "Data", "R2-D2" or "iRobot", they have been present in mythology long before.

You have probably seen, or at least heard of some movies that depict the never-ending theme of robots and their rebellion against humans, inferior beings, taking over the world, stuff like that. You'd probably think that after all these movies, they should have been here by now.

But where are they, and why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? You know, the ones where robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net.

Richard Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, in a book called Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village says that the business and political leaders in the world have continuously fueled our imagination with things to come to distract us from the present.

"In other words, how we're told that the importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but what the more advanced models might be able to do one day." He also says that much of today's technology, even the peaceful applications, came to be thanks to war.

The Cold War, that is, when the USSR and the United States dedicated huge resources to demonstrating which empire better represented progress and modernity. In those days, "NASA's spaceships [were promising to] evolve into luxurious interplanetary passenger liners, General Electric's nuclear fission reactors would become fusion plants providing limitless energy for all. IBM's computers were prototypes of artificial intelligence."

Do you see any of those ideas materialized around you? Nope. Well, do we really need another war of ambitions to benefit from technical developments? Let's hope not.