Forget the Terminators, our robot future may be squishy and fun

Are you worried that AI-powered robots are going to steal our jobs and maybe kill us all? You aren’t alone. But it is time to play devil’s advocate with yourself and consider whether the opposite might be true.

My new novel, Automatic Noodle, out later this year, is about four robots who struggle to find employment in a country where humans have made laws preventing bots from unionising, opening bank accounts, voting and owning their own businesses. Yes, it is science fiction. But it is based on real tech – and, more importantly, it explores the implications of our deeply held suspicion that robots are evil.

I have spent years writing non-fiction about real-life robots, interviewing roboticists and engineers to find out what is coming next. Recently, I visited an incredible lab at Yale University called the Faboratory, where Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio heads up a team developing soft robots. These include bendy, squishy, pneumatic creatures with circuits made from liquid metal. One swims like a turtle and could be used for environmental monitoring in swampy areas. Another, called a tensegrity robot, looks like a bundle of plastic sticks held together with stretchy rubber. Drop it from a height and it will bounce, rolling around to check out its surroundings.

Medha Goyal, a researcher at the Faboratory, showed me minuscule balls of fluid that expand as they warm up. Eventually, thousands of these “granular actuators” could be used inside a robot, expanding and contracting to create stiffness or softness in a limb. They could also turn out to have medical applications, pushing tiny robots around inside your body to deliver medicine or diagnose a problem.

The point is, Kramer-Bottiglio and her colleagues are challenging the very idea of what a robot is. Tomorrow’s bots probably won’t look like giant humanoids; instead, they might be soft little guys, tumbling around using pneumatics instead of metal gears. Indeed, one of the robots in my book is an octopus-shaped soft robot, designed for search-and-rescue missions in the water. This octobot’s name is Cayenne, and they are able to taste things using sensors on each arm.

When I imagine the future of robots, I see the likes of Cayenne. All they and their robot friends want is to run a noodle restaurant in San Francisco. Their robo-pals include a three-legged, wheeled bot named Sweetie; one named Hands who is nothing but a mixer with two arms attached; and Staybehind, a humanoid-ish soldier bot who would rather decorate the restaurant than fight a war. They make a ragtag family.

This family lives at a unique time in human history. In the 2060s, the government of the new nation of California has decreed that some AI-powered robots are basically people. But politicians worry that robots with the same rights as humans will multiply unchecked, rapidly taking over everything. So they deprive them of key rights “for their own good”, promising that humans can vote to expand robot rights later.

Despite what their human neighbours think, Cayenne and friends don’t want to take over the world. In fact, they only want to keep doing the jobs they already had. Except instead of making crap food for a distant human master, they will make something they love, with care, because they truly want to do it. They are basically immigrants in a new country, trying to survive in a nation that at best mistrusts them and at worst wants them dead.

I use this metaphor deliberately, because it is uncanny how much stereotypes about immigrants mirror human fears about robots. They will steal our jobs. They will rise up and destroy us. They will degrade the fabric of our culture. What is striking is that people who say these things about immigrants have often never spent time getting to know them. Meanwhile, people hold the same ideas about robots that don’t even exist yet. It seems like a pattern. These are the kinds of fears we have about groups we imagine without ever doing any research about the reality of who they are. Or, in the case of robots, who they might be.

And that is why, when I think about the future of robots and society, I don’t see machine overlords. I see reality obscured by scary fantasies and freedoms constrained by laws based on those fantasies. I see soft-bodied creatures and turtles and pneumatic arms, not Terminators. I see Cayenne, who lives in fear because of human hate and robophobic vigilance committees posting deepfakes online about made-up robot crimes.

Humans are masterminds at preparing for futures that are highly unlikely, while ignoring ones unfolding before our very eyes. But we don’t have to be that way. We can try to make plans based on evidence and science, rather than surreal nightmares that never come true.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Tochi Onyebuchi’s Racebook: A personal history of the internet, a totally engrossing essay collection about cosplay, video games and social media.

What I’m watching

Murderbot, obviously.

What I’m working on

Hanging out with archaeologists at the Punic/Roman town of Tharros on Sardinia in Italy. More on that later!

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author and their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com

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