Robot Child

This site contains depictions of robots as they might someday live on Earth or elsewhere. The pictures are accompanied by ruminations on the nature of living robots and unearthly ecologies.

Robots are pure machines. They are neither cyborgs nor androids. Many robots exist today. But none of them is alive. Now, on Earth, there are robots that adapt. There are robots that mimic some of the simple elements of insect behavior. There are robots that duplicate a few human facial expressions. But all of these are trivial machines. None of them is alive.

A robot that could exist without aid of any human or other biological entity might be considered alive though. Are humans smart enough to create such machine? Would such machines consider humans to be alive?

Here we are interested in living machines that exist independent of humans, perhaps in the distant future, or in other places in the universe. Living Robots are self-perpetuating purely machine entities whose ancestors were created or built by another form of life that existed previously to them. Further, living robots are self propagating. They reproduce or build offspring that are also capable of reproducing.

Robots that exist and reproduce in an environment after their creators have ceased to exist may start to integrate themselves with their biological post civilization environment. They may use other living things as material or even include other living things as part of their structure. In time, as traces of their creators disappear, these robots might take on a natural non-modular and organic appearance. These machine entities will exist within complex ecosystems and will extract nutrients from other forms of life. Perhaps they will extract information. They will need to eat.

They may need to nest and to breed. A living machine will be able to think a thought of a child and then build the thought into reality. Some hyper-sentient robots might have no genetic material at all. Such beings would be vastly more intelligent than we are and be capable of designing and building their children without the aid of any genetic information storage material. These machines might search for things to build their children out of. And these children machines may in turn look for things to recreate their parents from. Other more animalistic machines might copy themselves or follow stored designs to create their offspring.

Robots that build themselves and their offspring are true living machines, but entities that depend on biological elements for their structure and procreation are cyborgs. Cyborgs are part machine, part biological entity. In the time of machines, non-biological robots may consider cyborgs as impure chimeras of offspring and ancestor. But fused biological-machine entities may persist into the distant future. Machine and plant may become one.

It is likely that humans are smart enough to build machines that might someday lead to real living machines. It is not clear that humans are smart enough to directly build living machines. Current research into fully autonomous robotic systems remains at a very low level, at least in terms of something that might be considered alive. Humans are not very smart. The largest part of our intelligence is contained within our society. We are educated with this intelligence, and are able to do moderately complex things. Without this, we would be reduced to a rudimentary level similar to other biological entities on Earth. Robots however, might be able to develop intelligence without the aid of any society just by experiencing their world. Perhaps a living robot could learn about its world, and then create symbolic representations for itself, and then derive an understanding of nature, all without the aid of others. Eventually, such a living robot would acquire the knowledge to design and build its own offspring. Its children would spring from pure though, develop from direct experience with the universe. No human can know its their universe and itself deeply enough to procreate in such a way.

Many human researchers have given up on the goal of building a thinking robot. A common statement reflecting this is “a human must be in the loop”. These people have given up on our destiny.