Vision

We rebuild the human condition – with, and eventually, as robots.

Mission

Our mission is to change how we view and experience the role of robots and robotics in the world; to enable the better building and deployment of robotics products with their social, environmental, and cultural impact in mind; and to harness the power of emergent robotics technologies for an anti-fragile future.

This is ambitious and extremely challenging.

We love flying drones in the park with our children, but we are reluctant to have our packages delivered by drones but we continue to accept an underpaid, overworked underclass made up typically of immigrants who do this work instead. Why?

We say we are committed to equitable and just work conditions for women and girls, but we are hesitant to embrace robotic assistants who can ease the burden of care so often placed on women. Why?

Our built environments are increasingly threatened by environmental disasters – from air pollution to floodings to wild fires – and yet we do not think of robotic first-response infrastructure-on-demand as a mitigative solution to them. Why?

At Robots, actually! we operate in the space between the hard diagnostic whys and even harder interventional how to-s. We leverage the depth and breadth of insights of the social sciences to level up the social and cultural ground upon which to create improved conditions for advanced human-robot relations.

Principles

Our principles encapsulate these excess necessary to bring robots into the world.

Vision over Urgency

Robots, actually! addresses topics in hardware robotics development on the merits of relevance, implication, and ambition, and not under the pressure of current fads and remits.

Interaction over Broadcast

In anything we do, we strive to engage, interact, and collaborate. One-way communications are uncollaborative and undemocratic. Even in a broadcast, we will be building backchannels and channels connecting our interlocutors, partners, and stakeholders to us and to each other.

Collaboration over compliance

Interaction with and within Robots, actually! is guided by a common trust and tendency for action. It’s not about setting up rules and following them, but about trusting and then breaking the rules together, and how we come back grow together through shared learnings.

Mutability over Calcification

Change is healthy, and we learn. Therefore, everything that Robots, actually! does will always evolve and if a program is twice the same, that’s an indication that it should change.

Multi-scalar over Straight Forward

Robots, actually! works as a parallax on human-machine worlds, and as such it is a movement in the search of other viewpoints, and new ways of seeing. With us, you are invited to think and work a step ahead and see around the corner. We do not lie, but we anticipate change: things are what they seem at first, but then they’re also much more.

Integrity over Politics

We focus on integrity of action, so we develop a sensitivity to our actions in the fast-changing world. We stay true to common sense, not the mind games and the pretty words.

Ownership over Box-ticking

Ethics must be embedded in contexts and lived relations and obligations, in owning and living responsibilities, rooted in the integrity of common sense. It cannot be a bureaucracy, a religion of prohibitions, or a minimum viable pulpit.