Does the Future Society Belong to Robots?

21 May 2007

The image that most of us have on robots comes, in the first place, from movies such as ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Star Trek’, but also from the images of the boring assembling lines of the Japanese automobiles. The contrast between these two points of view, between these two images has produced a certain disappointment among the people as concerning robotics. This view is completely justified, right? After all these years of technological progress, we still don’t have any robots to which we can talk to and which could help us with the house work. This way, we totally exclude from the equation the robots that can fight in the wars or robots that can fly spaceships or do other things that the robots do in the science-fiction movies.

But reality contradicts both images. It is true that we do not have robots to which we could talk, but we have nonetheless robots that have successfully participated to extremely complicated surgical interventions. It is also true that we don’t have robots as soldiers, but the American army is one of the greatest investors in robotics. There have been created robots that can efficiently contribute to human life savings. Take for instance the example of the famous robot that was sent to inspect Chernobyl.

It would be a bit naïve of us to expect robotics to start from zero and reach in a relatively short time (about five decades since the first functional prototypes) to performances comparable to the human ones. Although still far from the dreams of the pioneers in the field, robotics brings us each day a bit closer to these dreams, and this progress is accelerating every day. At least many specialists in robotics have ambitious and optimist plans.

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