The fact that there are few or no robots in your home does not mean that there are no robots at all out there. Modern manufacturing would be unthinkable without robots: more than 3 million industrial robots were operational in factories by the end of 2020, 32 percent of them purchased by car manufacturers.2 Robots keep finding new applications and markets, from logistics to surveillance, from surgery to farming. Drones monitor plantations and guide harvesting. Fleets of wheeled robots move goods day and night in the large warehouses that power e-commerce, while larger siblings load and unload containers on cargo ships in automated harbors. In 2020, people bought more than 19 million robots for domestic and personal use, although they call them vacuum cleaners or lawn mowers.3 Robots are roving, drilling, and flying on Mars, though they are mostly piloted by humans on Earth.
Most of these robots—the ones that we can buy—are built with the technology of the appliances that they are meant to replace; therefore, they have only a limited understanding of their surroundings and limited decisional autonomy. You cannot tell them or show them what to do. You have to program their moves or, in the best case, select preprogrammed actions from an app. And unlike personal computers, they are not general-purpose machines: they may do one thing very well but cannot easily switch to a slightly different task. Ask them to repeat the same action again and again, and they are great. Ask them to improvise, learn from experience, gain human trust, and they get stuck. In other words, robots are great at a few things, but they suck at all the rest. Worse, they suck at things that we—and indeed much simpler animals—can do effortlessly. These limitations became obvious, for example, when a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011 and a disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant ensued. Japan, a robotics superpower if there ever was one, tried sending robots instead of humans to check the site of the nuclear accident, only to discover that they were not up to the task. Not even close.
And yet, think for a moment of what robots could do for us—what problems they could solve, what risks they could take for us, what places they could go—if they only resembled living beings a bit more—for example, if they could understand the meaning or function of what they see, if they could engage with us as other people or pets usually do, or if they could autonomously coordinate with other robots to carry out tasks that a single robot cannot handle, as human and animal societies do. What kind of world could we build with those robots?
In this book, we imagine that world, and we tell what is brewing in labs around the world with the help of brilliant and visionary scientists and engineers who want to make it possible.
Every chapter is built around a fictional story set a few decades into the future, intersected with nonfictional accounts of the research that, here and today, is paving the way for that future.
2. International Federation of Robotics, “IFR Industrial Robotics Report” (International Federation of Robotics, 2021).
3. International Federation of Robotics, “IFR Service Robotics Report” (International Federation of Robotics, 2021).
Copyright © 2022 by Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
