Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Robots already have their own blood. Will they shed it for us?

Recent reports (available online) from two prestigious universities (Harvard and Cornell) explain that robots already have their own "blood", that is, a liquid that circulates inside the robots and that carries energy to the entire robot-body so that the robot can fulfill the tasks assigned to it.

It should be clarified that this liquid, known as robotic blood, is used in so-called soft robots, and not, for the moment, in the most well-known metallic or “hard” robots. Robotic blood allows soft robots (clearly precursors of artificial humans) to maintain their shape or even recover it, should they be crushed.

Be that as it may, the idea of robotic blood seems to have consequences beyond questions of robots, machines, science, and artificial intelligence. In fact, throughout history, humans have associated blood (own or animal) with all kinds of beliefs and rituals, from sacrifices to appease the gods to the promise of immortality.

Should we now add robots to that short list of living beings with their own blood on this planet? In other words, what does it mean that robots, whether soft or metallic, large or small, intelligent or not, now have their own blood?

Perhaps a better question is whether we should assign to robotic blood all or at least some of the beliefs we commonly associate with human and animal blood. I mean: will we sacrifice robots on an altar as lambs or bulls were sacrificed before?

Regardless of the answer, we will know it soon, perhaps in just ten years, because other scientific reports from reliable sources indicate that by 2030 the integration between robots and humans will reach such a level that we will practically be inseparable from each other, not because we will become robots or them humans, but because robots will be part of our daily life.

So, in this conflictive and increasingly intolerant world, with a growing social field of negativity that does not necessarily mobilize the social field of positivity to grow, the title question takes on a new urgency and meaning: will the robots shed their blood for us? Or maybe a single robot will do it to save us all?

In his last interview for a newspaper in Germany, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (yes, I am aware of his many controversial aspects) stated that we cannot make the divinity come to us, but we can help create the hope that the divinity will come.

Regardless of what Heidegger may have said or thought, the technological and scientific advances of our time can be interpreted as the desire to create (or recreate) our own divinity or to become ourselves divine. And maybe we are doing it and achieving it.

In fact, futurist Ray Kurzweil had said that by 2029 we will all become immortal. It seems his prediction is no longer a laughing matter. 

I wonder what narrative will be told in 2000 years about what is now emerging for the future of humanity that many are unable or unwilling to perceive.

Go Back