Robots And How We’re Socialising Them

Most of what we hear about robots is that they’re going to take jobs, or we’re going to use them to fight wars and do nasty things. They’re already being used in military applications. That’s a certain danger. They’re not, however, going to take all the jobs. Just like AI isn’t either. In fact, we’re going to need a lot of robots.

First I’ll look at why we’re going to need robots, then I’ll look at how they’re being socialized to become more culturally acceptable. Which is in part interesting because this socializing wasn’t done with Generative AI.

Why We Will Need Robots

If you’re a Gen X now, in your mid 50’s to early 60’s, you may well find that a robot will play a role in your healthcare in the coming two decades. Especially if you end up in extended care homes.

Here’s the big thing; the world population is declining. While there’s some disagreement as to when we’ll hit a peak population and how many that will be, Western countries (WEIRD) have been in population decline for some decades. Even India is heading for a decline and China has a serious population slowdown underway. The only continent experiencing population growth is Africa.

There are a number of reasons. One of the biggest contributors is that as countries become more prosperous, people don’t feel the need to have more children. In the past, more children was part of survival. Not so much when you’ve got a pension, house and your retirement years are looked after. Although that may not be the case for much longer.

We’re in a bit of a messy phase right now, what I call a period of ferment. A sort of Sturm und Drang as we enter the digital age. We’re re-examining our sociocultural systems as we go through a massive period of change. But that’s a whole other topic. Back to robots.

Dancing instructor robots. Chef robots and ones that will do the laundry and never forget to take the garbage out. As I live in Canada my preference is for a robot that has a flamethrower on the front to melt away all the snow after a snowstorm.

The reality is, we’re going to need robots to do a variety of tasks, from manufacturing and warehouse jobs to military and healthcare and beyond.

How We’re Socialising Robots

We’ve had the idea of robots in our societies for quiet a while as in over 2,000 years ago. In ancient Greek mythology this was represented by Cadmus, who apparently was rather good at sewing. He sewed dragons teeth that turned into soldiers. Artificial life.

The Buddhist scholar Daoxuan described human like machines made of metal that would recite sacred texts in a cloister that had a magnificent clock and he called them “precious metal-people.”

Early Chinese Daoist texts discuss humanoid automatons. In the Hindu collection of cycles and lores, the Lokapannatti has a story of how an army of automated soldiers was created to protect the relics of the Buddha. The idea of robots has been with us a rather long time.

For much of the past few decades however, robots have been rather unfairly vilified, mostly through Hollywood films and science-fiction literature, although sometimes as helping humanity. Much of this fear is because robots have become more feasible with advances in digital technologies.

The closer a technology comes to being truly revolutionary in terms of its impact on society, the more we tend to fear it. This is because we aren’t sure how it will impact us and our tendency is to first prepare to fight, or at least defend what we know. We’re an odd bunch when it comes to change.

But we are starting to see a shift in how robots are being presented to society. Increasingly as helpers and taking away the mundanities of our lives. Videos have played a key role in the past decade or more in presenting videos to wider audiences. This is key to creating broader awareness.

A video conveys a complex idea of the role robots play in our societies much better than a long-form article or book can. Robots are highly active technology, they participate in the physical domain and aren’t purely in the digital domain, although as they bring in more AI tools to operate, they straddle the phygital, that liminal space between physical and digital.

There are more toy robots on the market as well. When technologies are introduced in formats where we can play with them, they also begin to gain broader societal acceptance. If we feel more in control of a given technology, we tend towards greater acceptance.

Robot manufacturers understand this very well. Which is why we see so many from Boston Dynamics and those that show robots in warehouses and even on construction sites. Salem, Oregon based robotics company Agility Robotics is planning to open a manufacturing facility that makes humanoid robots for use in warehouses.

Increasingly, there are documentaries and news stories covering how robots are being used in healthcare, from surgery to moving patients around. The Japanese have been testing robot companions for the elderly with a fair degree of success.

This shift in how robots are being presented to us is important in terms of their adoption socioculturally. As I recently wrote, an important aspect of how technologies are adopted within a culture is how much cultural agency that technology is given and whether that agency is positive or negative.

With the shift in how robots are being presented to society in ways beyond military applications, they may ease into our societies much better than the way Generative AI slammed into us like a sledgehammer. Robot manufacturers should take note. Societies don’t really like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer.

Robots are advancing and it’s fascinating to watch. The upside is that they are taking longer to evolve than some AI tools like LLMs. This gives society time to consider how we want them to participate in our sociocultural systems.

The cultural agency we have given to tools like Generative AI and social media has turned more negative in the last year for GAI and the last few years for social media. This will benefit the robotics industry as systems like politics and economics and our ways of social governance will begin to put boundaries around AI and social media.

The reality is that we will need a lot more robots. Some Western countries hold out hopes of attracting immigrants from younger African nations, but this may not work as desired. As African nations improve their economic and social infrastructures, these younger generations will prefer to stay in their homelands.

Robots are not going to be our overlords, rather, they will be a supplemental labour force we will be in need of. Parents with babies who need diaper changes will, I suspect, be fine with passing that task onto robots with no sense of smell.

We are still in the opening phases of robots in our society. It’s about to get more interesting.

Image Courtesy: Natasa Grabovac on Unsplash