The dystopian answer to that question is clearly “yes,” a perspective that has dominated our conversation about artificial beings ever since the word “robot” was introduced by Czech playwright Karel Čapek in his 1921 dark comedy, “R.U.R.” or “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” But the fear of machines replacing humans goes back even earlier, to the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the modern factory. It’s an anxiety we’ve been living with for a few hundred years.
“Humans have a marvelous range and plasticity,” said Cuan in an interview. “My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. She was born in Cuba, lived there her whole life, and worked in a cigar factory rolling Partagas cigars. Her body was able to do that labor and it became a way for her to support her family. We wanted to show the poetry of that motion as opposed to what the prevailing media narrative is, that it’s denigrating humans and saying they’re immediately replaceable.
“Because the robot was so heavy we did most of our work and rehearsals in the lab,” said Qiu in an interview. “Not to mention we also had music blasting on large speakers,” continued Ganti. “Catie needed the full space to dance so the other student projects were cramped into a corner. We really have to thank them for bearing with us while we got through the process.”By late autumn of 2023 Ganti had mapped all the desired motions onto the robot joints and Qiu had fail-safed the software pipeline.
As a youngster, McKinley spent summers in his aunt and uncle’s metalsmithing studio. “They’d be making a complex piece and would put me and my brothers to work cutting things out with a saw or planishing a bowl with a hammer or sanding something,” explained McKinley. “That experience taught me to respect the process of working with one’s hands and getting to know materials. It gave me a huge leg up in engineering school because I understood how metals moved and how they fatigued and broke.
“This is very exciting because you can stand next to a cobot and if it did swing and hit you on the arm it would stop immediately,” explained Goldberg. “It might give you a bruise but it wouldn’t break your arm.” This is the gift of living in an age of AI and robotics. For the first time in history we are teaching the essence of what it means to be human to machines—our creativity to AI, and our dexterity to robots. In return, we are learning so much about ourselves.