Meet the Future

I’m not what you would call a serious science fiction geek, but I really like the movie Blade Runner. I’ve seen the original release, the director’s cut, the 25^th anniversary director’s cut, the Criterion Collection cut and probably a few of the others (there have been at least seven with sometimes subtle differences, so it’s hard to keep track). And I really liked the novel it was based on: Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? How could you not love something with a title like that?

Dick’s story and other sci-fi works pretty much sum up how we have historically thought about robots—humanoid to varying degrees and existing in some future world or in a galaxy far, far away—but that attitude is wrong on multiple counts.

It turns out there were robots in use in the 1700s, more than a hundred years before the futuristic science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as the recently published Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self makes clear.

The book’s author explained in an article for Slate:

“Going back a little further in history, to the Enlightenment, we see that clockmakers and carpenters built exceptionally sophisticated mechanical androids that were run by clockwork and housed in beautiful decorated cases. Two father-and-son artisan teams, Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz in Switzerland and Abraham and David Roentgen in the Rhine valley near Cologne (Germany), built androids in the 1770s and 1780s that displayed piano-playing women. The artisans used these spectacular objects as gifts for their wealthy and aristocratic clients, who would ornament their mansions and entertain their guests with the curious machines.”

And robots are not just relics of the craftsmanship of long-dead Enlightenment Age artisans or something in our future like flying cars. They are here now and range from sophisticated devices used by law enforcement to detect and dismantle bombs to the Roomba searching out dust bunnies under your couch. Robots have been used for industrial applications for more than 50 years, but unless you take factory tours, you’ve probably never seen one.

The cost of creating robots has fallen dramatically in the last few years, while the flexibility of robotic technology has continued to grow. Industrial robots are able to complete more tasks at a lower price — a trend that is expected to continue for decades to come.

But robots are also becoming more human-like. A recent article  in The New York Times mentioned a two-foot high, $16,000 robot used in academic research that when kissed on the cheek by an engineer, “tilted its head, touched his cheek and let out an audible smack.” A very humanoid response (and a stereotypical French one, too).

That same article talks about a robotic arm that has been programmed to operate a Keurig coffee maker, a mobile robot that delivers mail and a robotic dance partner used in physical therapy.

Needless to say, robots also make great toys. A store in Chicago, Robot City Workshop, is the high-tech place for kids’ birthday parties. For $40/child, the store provides a two-hour experience where partygoers play with interactive robots, assemble snap circuits and build a miniature automaton to take home.

The use of robots to perform all sorts of tasks that humans consider too dirty or dangerous is bound to increase; but so will more intimate interactions between man and machine. In fact, next Tuesday (11/12/13), a robot (okay, just a robotic hand) is scheduled to ring the closing bell at Nasdaq.

JCPR client ROBO-STOX created the first index to track the fragmented robotics and automations market. Now they are launching the ROBO-STOX Global Robotics and Automation Fund, the first exchange-traded fund (ETF) to give investors easy access to investing in the burgeoning field of robotics, which will be the occasion of the robotic bell ringing.

I think we’ve still got a long way to go before we have to deal with the off-world replicants depicted in Blade Runner, but who knows. I didn’t think there were robots in the 1700s, either. 

If robots are something from the future, then the future is now.