A spirit is haunting modern robotics – the spirit of puritanism.

That feeling is creeping up on me daily, as I scroll along my Linkedin feed, boredly scouring the self-promotional platitudes and AI-generated how-to carousels we all post on there for something that will make me sit up and compete in Big Ideas, Bigger Thinking, and Biggest Stakes. There´s lots and lots and lots of responsibility and ethics swirling around – sort of makes me feel like I´m on a diet consisting only of broccoli…there´s that much healthy eating anyone can take, and that much ethics and responsibility talk also. And that´s already a social scientist talking. I can’t imagine how this feels like on the robot engineers side (but do let me know, roboticist folks reading this. When does your cup overbrim with the ethics and responsibility spirit?)

Inevitably, when we talk about the implications of robots, the public – that ur-deity of civics – is invoked, but ironically, members of the public are never really present or involved in these marathons of intellectual self-righteousness. My baker is not at that panel, and I am yet to see the men riding the waste collection truck that services my neighborhood in the conference room either. If we are keen on getting the public involved in questions about how robotics can, will, and ought to (3 different questions) impact jobs, livelihoods and role and status in society, we really ought to go out to where “the public” is. We ought to wake up at 3 am for the early baking shift or hop on the back on the garbage truck. Roboticists and social scientists are equally to blame for the state of this. The former tend to hardly ever get out of the lab; the latter get out in the wild, only to get lost in the kind of theorization wilderness where nobody can launch adequate search and rescue to bring them back to common sense.

It is no coincidence, given all this, that so often the conversation starts and ends with ethics (and I will be dedicating a separate, much longer rant to this). It is all very normative and proper, and the messiness of lived realities gets decoupled from the end-all “should.” There´s a whole lot of shoulds in robot ethics these days, delivered from the serene safety of conceptual spaces and half-attended conferences. Go out and collect garbage for a day and then let´s talk about should that job be automated or not, and how. #dishonestinrobotics (Disclaimer: I have not collected garbage either, but I have had to do comparably revolting jobs in other contexts; an experience which makes me convinced that you cannot be an ethicist unless you´ve scrubbed someone´s fecal matter off porcelain bowls or floors – all jobs robots can, should, and hopefully, will do in the future).

This is not to say that I do not value the work of colleagues in this space. To the contrary, I am forever a grateful recipient of their learned wisdom and scholarly diligence, and humbled by the decency of their impetus, which I shamelessly draw on in order to try to destabilize their findings in teasing out a more playful future #ImpsandRobots. But this is to say that, whether because of my curious temperament or my intellectual proclivity to traverse into territories where I regularly get to break my neck, I am missing a different spirit in how we collectively approach the question of what robotics is, what it could be, what it should be. This is where I cannot help but feel that the spirit currently overwhelmingly dominating is puritanism: disapproval by presumption and by default.

There are so many aspects of how we collectively think and work on the very idea of robotics, and the way it manifests in the world that are, well…boring. I am bored, aren’t you? Take the idea of the robot as inanimate (a separate rant, and a podcast episode, coming up on the derivative idea of the robot as a tool). I blame the thinking we have inherited from the Enlightenment a lot for the current inability – at least in the Occidental tradition – to overcome that way of ordering categories in the world. # robotsohso18thcentury. I much prefer the period which came after it – Romanticism – as a source of inspiration of how we might approach the building of robots and robotic worlds. Daunting and overwhelming; intriguing from the start, stormy in the middle, and often with dramatic, operatic ends, perhaps, but never neat and small #romanticaboutrobots #robotoperas

Robots, actually! is looking for a different spirit – embodied in different approaches, attitudes, and inspirations #robotmuse

So, tell us: to you, today, what is the spirit of modern robotics and what hashtag should represent it?