– How did you get from tourism to robonomics and AI research? Aren't those rather distant fields?

– Before I started at the Varna University of Management, I worked at a travel agency and was responsible for developing its booking system. From 2001 to 2005 I was doing exactly that: putting digital technologies into practice in tourism. Later, through academia, I focused on the economic and marketing aspects.

About 10 years ago I saw that technology had reached a high level of development and could automate the processes in tourism to a large extent. At the same time, those processes were badly lagging behind. So I began doing research in that direction.

Reading the academic literature, I became convinced that automation would change the world substantially. That the current fourth industrial revolution is entirely different from everything before it. The steam engine, the internal combustion engine, computers—

there has always been a need for a human to operate them, and now we have reached the point where technology can make decisions on its own.

This is a fundamental change, and it intrigued me even more to see how far things could go.

– Where do you imagine automation and robotization entering tourism in the coming years?

– It all depends on economic factors. Even now, almost every activity in tourism can be automated. Starting from the moment a tourist gets inspired about where to travel, through the booking process, pricing and so on. Work in the restaurant, the hotel, the travel agency, even tour guiding can be 100 percent automated.

But will it actually happen in practice? The fact that something is technically possible does not mean engineers will really be able to meet expectations. The second factor is the client's budget, in this case the tourism company. A tour guide's work can be automated with a voice assistant, but is the museum willing to pay for such technology?

The third factor is customers. Are they willing to pay for an automated, robotized service? I have done several studies, and they all show that

when tourists are served by technology—whether a chatbot or a robot—rather than directly by a person, they expect a discount.

We found that whatever the service, tourists expect a discount of between 8 and 10 percent. Because of all this, how far automation goes depends on the balance between revenues and costs. That balance will show whether a given service is worth automating.

Which in turn suggests that the services requiring the most labor will be automated first.

– Clearly people's fear and skepticism are an important factor. I see it in the huge number of comments on our pieces about how technology is destroying us, how artificial intelligence and robots are enslaving us… And maybe that is exactly what slows things down. Supermarkets have self-checkouts now, but few people use them, mostly younger ones.

– Absolutely! In the early 1990s, when the first ATMs appeared, people withdrew their entire salaries en masse because they were afraid the machine would keep their money. True, fees were very high back then, and you couldn't pay by card everywhere. But today it's no problem, and everyone pays by card whenever they can.

People get used to things. People grow up. But there is always a transition period when a given technology needs very strong support.

The question that arises here is the degree of automation. In tourism, for example, everything can be done. For now the hardest tasks are those involving manual labor—making the bed, cleaning the room. The problem there is the design of the hotel room, which is made to be serviced by people. The bed is designed in such a way that a robot simply cannot put the sheets on. And these tasks won't be automated any time soon, because that would require a complete redesign of the hotel room. Once again economic logic leads—the hotels are already built, and it would be a serious expense.

– Isn't it paradoxical? Machines are replacing us in many of the tasks we used to consider intellectual. Yet the work of a chambermaid—supposedly not so complex, prestigious or well paid—turns out to be beyond them…

– That is the so-called Moravec's paradox—things that are hard for humans are easy for technology, and vice versa.

We have two kinds of activities, cognitive and physical. Cognitive ones, such as writing a text or making a video, are complex for us humans. But for artificial intelligence they are relatively easy, because it doesn't need to receive information from the physical world; it simply works with what it has been given. It has data and processes it with algorithms to produce a final result.

Physical activities, however, are much more complex. Take a robot delivering room service in a hotel—it has to know where it is, communicate with the elevator, understand that it has arrived so it can get out. When there's an obstacle in its way, it has to change its trajectory. By default, physical tasks are much harder for machines than cognitive ones. For a machine, writing an advertisement is far easier than changing the sheets.

A few months ago I published an article with a co-author from Portugal.

We created a marketing strategy for a 5-star hotel in Lisbon using nothing but ChatGPT.

Everything was perfectly adequate, relevant and highly professional. The article is freely available here.

– I had a similar experiment—ChatGPT generated an influencer for me and she reached 85,000 people, and nobody wrote that something was off. If these are the trends, what skills make sense to develop now?

– People who have no desire to develop will certainly be replaced by automation. That is absolutely certain.

What we have to do is develop all kinds of skills, including technical ones, but above all social skills and the skills to use artificial intelligence. It isn't ChatGPT that will replace marketing managers, but the people who use it. Artificial intelligence simply helps them be much more effective and make faster decisions.

Or it offers unconventional ideas. That's mostly what I use ChatGPT for. The texts it generates don't meet the quality I need, but when I ask for 10 ideas about something, 7 are ones I've already seen, 2 are irrelevant, but one remains that wouldn't have occurred to me and is worth developing.

It is important for universities and secondary schools to start teaching how to use artificial intelligence as soon as possible.

Four years ago at our university we introduced a course called Technologies in Hospitality and Tourism. All sorts of things are taught, including artificial intelligence. We also bought a robot so that students could interact with it.

The effect is striking! Students who were more skeptical of technology became more open to it once they started using a chatbot or a robot, while those who were overly optimistic became a bit more conservative—in other words, the two extremes converge. This should be introduced across the education system.

In the end, tourism is hospitality. And if we hand over to robots and artificial intelligence some of the tasks that waste our time, we'll be able to give tourists more attention. In the long run it will turn out that

technology not only fails to replace people in tourism but, on the contrary, helps the industry return to its roots.

– And not only in tourism; I think these trends are similar in almost every sector. But many people say: it's been a year and a half since ChatGPT appeared, and there's still no field where productivity has changed dramatically. Do we need time, or is there a chance the predictions of big changes won't come true?

– It takes time.

People tend to overestimate the changes that happen in the short term and underestimate the long-term ones.

Changes come exponentially—up close they look small, but over time they add up.

In my view, ChatGPT has already revolutionized certain activities, education for example.

Over the past two academic years, higher education worldwide has faced a serious problem. Universities were forced either to ban artificial intelligence or to adapt somehow. At the Varna University of Management, where I was then vice-rector for research, we ran an experiment. We allowed students in two courses to use ChatGPT. At the end I compared the grades with those from the previous year, May 2022, and the difference was just 2 percent! This year I checked again, and the grades were similar to last year's. That is,

ChatGPT did not lead to a dramatic rise in grades, but it forced universities to change their assignments.

For example, ChatGPT will easily write a 500-word essay on what the consequences of using artificial intelligence in tourism would be. But what stops us from generating such a text and having students analyze it, judge whether it's relevant, and so develop their critical thinking?

Translations have become much better, chatbots now hold far more human conversations, which increases user satisfaction. Publishing has been revolutionized too—whether we're talking about fiction or academic literature, many people have started using it to write texts for them.

Of course, this has many negative consequences as well. For instance, I noticed that Google Scholar was indexing publications under my name that I never wrote. Simply put,

some “authors” have used ChatGPT to generate references for them to include in their publications.

I expect call centers to suffer significantly, especially once companies start training their own models and fine-tuning them to their specific needs.

– One of the big concerns is that it is becoming ever harder to tell what's created from what's generated. I suppose that's also why you did a study on what rights and duties we would give robots, is that right?

– So much has been written on the subject, but almost all of it is philosophical, legal and above all conceptual. In other words, empirical evidence is lacking. My idea was to see to what extent one of David Gunkel's main conceptual frameworks—whether robots “can and should” have rights—holds up.

There were 215 respondents. For the first time, we looked not only at the rights but also at the duties of robots, because we believe that just as people have rights and duties, so should robots.

According to the results, Bulgarians believe robots should respect human rights even when those are directed against the robots themselves. The two duties—to obey all laws and to protect human rights—received the strongest support.

As for rights: to be maintained and not to be abused.

If we look at what the rights of slaves used to be, it would be exactly the same!

They must follow the rules, and their owner must take care of them. They have no right to vote, to go on strike, to own property, to apply for positions, to receive a salary.

Our other finding is that Bulgarians make no distinction between whether robots “can” or “should” have a particular right. For them the two concepts are the same.

We looked at three groups of respondents—lawyers, people from IT and everyone else. In practice there was no difference in the answers of the three groups!

– This association of machines with slaves is very strong, but out of so many guests on Digital Stories, I had only heard it from a priest until now…

– The article that is about to be published is called exactly that: “Robots Should Be Slaves: Bulgarians’ Perceptions of the Possible Rights of Robots.”

They have a duty to follow the rules, to be maintained, fed, and at the same time they have no right to strike, to reproduce… In other words, they are slaves and nothing else, exactly as it was in the Roman Empire. But do robots want this, if the verb “want” even applies to them?

I asked ChatGPT to write the lyrics of a song about robot rights, and the Suno platform generated the music for it. The finished song, generated entirely by artificial intelligence, can be heard here.

– We keep talking about humanoid robots, but they still seem far off. Do you think it's realistic that we'll see them one day?

– Oh, yes! It's absolutely realistic. But I think too much emphasis is being placed on humanoid robots right now. The whole revolution in robonomics is being achieved by non-humanoid robots and AI agents.

An agent doesn't need to be embedded in a robot, in some physical body.

On the other hand, the humanoid form is the least suitable one for a robot. It's ideal for a single purpose—communication.

A humanoid robot can't carry a tray, can't serve, because its hands can't hold a tray. It makes no sense. Better to make a minibar on wheels that rolls around like R2-D2. That is, give it a more functional design.

A humanoid design makes sense at a hotel reception desk or an airport, providing information. Or for a sex robot. If one of those didn't have a humanoid design, it would become a kind of pathology…

– Even if it looks human, there still seems to be an element of pathology, at least for now… But Elon Musk says Optimus will become a bigger project than Tesla precisely because it's a humanoid robot.

– If he sells 10 million robots, it will certainly be bigger than Tesla. But it makes no sense. For me, from an economic point of view, building a humanoid robot that walks on legs, has hands with five fingers and looks like a human is an absolute waste of money, time and effort.

There should be some of those too. But it's like making a car that uses legs instead of wheels.

It's much better to produce robots with a functional design that helps them perform different tasks effectively and efficiently.

– If our predictions are right, many more human occupations will be automated within a few years. New professions are emerging, but there are far fewer of them, and people become much more efficient at every task… Do we have any option other than some kind of unconditional basic income?

– An unconditional basic income won't be introduced in the next 10 to 15 years, but I firmly believe it will happen by the end of the century. Because

the effects of automation keep accelerating. But there will be quite a few upheavals before we get there.

The countries with the greatest need for automation are those with the most serious demographic crisis. There, automation will make up for the shortage of people.

On the other hand, there are countries with growing populations. That's where the problem will be. Shrinking job numbers there will lead to huge waves of migration. What Europe saw in 2015 will be nothing by comparison. And

when you add the factor of climate migrants, the situation in the coming decades will be very, very serious.

There will be many obstacles to introducing an unconditional basic income. But it is certainly one of the good solutions.

– And we really won't work…?

– I don't think everyone will be unemployed. Rather, we'll reach a situation where 60 to 70 percent, even 80 percent of people won't work and will receive some form of unconditional basic income. The other 20 to 40 percent will work but will earn, say, 10 times the basic income.

Right now, in any country, if you offered people an amount roughly equal to the average income without working, but also without the right to vote, I'm convinced at least 50 percent would probably agree.

But if you hand out money every month that the economy hasn't earned, should that income be tied to real production? In principle, yes, but perhaps at some point simpler controls will emerge. For example, you get 300 euros that you have to spend within a month. That's one way inflation could be kept in check.

And here the next problem arises. When more than half the population receives a basic income, populist parties will win elections very easily. They'll simply promise 500 euros. The next ones will promise 1,000…

Perhaps the right to vote should be tied to the right to receive an unconditional basic income. And what about children? They cost money too; it could lead to a demographic explosion—you have children so you can collect the money.

An unconditional basic income is certainly the future,

but the right mechanism has to be created, one that doesn't lead to bankrupt states or the rise of populists.

The entire economic system will be transformed. Just imagine—you have an autonomous car that schedules its own next inspection. And pays for it itself from your digital wallet. Whether the car does it or you do, from an accounting point of view there's no difference. So who is the customer then—you or your autonomous car? And the next step—everything as a service?

– Yes, with developments like that, owning your own car becomes almost unnecessary. An interesting future awaits us; I'd be glad to continue this conversation someday!

– I read that you will soon introduce us to the future of robotics, and it is definitely exciting. Could you introduce Mara, the arm we can see here?

– Of course. Robotics, its varieties and its applications make up a very broad field. Take an area like car manufacturing, where mostly industrial robots are used. They are

big, fast, precise and extremely productive, but also dangerous.

That is why they are fenced off in cages that people cannot enter—otherwise the robot could hurt them.

Mara, on the other hand, made by the company Universal Robots, is something like the Mercedes of so-called “collaborative robots,” or “cobots.” An industrial robot, but one designed to work alongside people. It carries out its task, and I can safely be right next to it, working on mine. We can also help each other—collaborate, which is where the name comes from.

It is equipped with precise touch sensors. Set up properly, if it touches you, it stops immediately so that it cannot hurt you. To make it completely harmless, a collaborative robot is often combined with additional safety sensors. They detect whether a person is entering its work zone and send a signal that automatically switches it into slow mode.

– What is Mara capable of?

– She is an industrial “arm” with 6 degrees of freedom, achieved through 6 rotors, also called “joints.” Each of them can rotate 360 degrees in both directions. The joints can work in remarkable unison, guaranteeing smooth and even elegant movement.

The robot imitates, more or less, the human limb from the shoulder, through the elbow, to the wrist. Just as you can reach the same point with your arm in many different ways, so can she. You can go around obstacles and reach hard-to-access places.

Mara has an interactive tablet with one single hardware button, and it is red. All robots, this one included, have one, and it serves the same function: emergency stop. If something unexpected happens, it literally pulls her plug.

Simple, predictable, repeatable tasks can be programmed directly through the robot’s tablet. For more complex tasks, in a dynamic and unpredictable environment, and for integration with other systems, you switch to a different, special mode of external program control.

This robot is relatively affordable—it costs around 30,000 to 40,000 euros. It is not something a person would buy for their living room… but the price makes it usable for small and medium-sized businesses. It has been calculated that the investment pays for itself in six months on average, as long as you find a use for it. An extremely interesting “toy.” With literally 50 lines of code you can make it perform all kinds of tasks.

The possibilities are practically unlimited!

– What is the hardest part of learning to control robots like this?

– Definitely movement in space. People and robots perceive the world differently. We use a Cartesian coordinate system—move something 20 centimeters to the left and 50 centimeters up. Robots use a so-called joint system—what degree of rotation each joint has to take in order to reach the required pose. The conversion between the two systems is done through mathematical techniques.

Reaching the final pose, however, is far from everything. We have to take into account the acceleration, the maximum speed and the specific trajectory the robot is to follow. Add a dynamic environment—moving obstacles—and the situation quickly becomes challenging.

Does Mara know where she needs to go? Add cameras and sensors to navigate her.

Of course, robotics is a subject that can be learned with the right approach, materials and hardware. In the winter of 2022, my colleagues and I organized a free course in software control of robots, which we called Robotics Accelerator. It gave participants the chance to learn and experiment both in simulation and on a real collaborative robot—Mara. Those who took part included a high school student, university students, professionals, even the director of a tech company and a university lecturer. The experiments were endlessly interesting, and it very quickly became clear how many different tasks can be dreamed up.

– The company you work for, Ocado Technology, builds solutions for warehouses that run with minimal human intervention. How automated are the processes?

– The company’s core technology product is the Ocado Smart Platform, an online commerce platform. We develop automation and robotics technologies that did not exist before.

Imagine 1,000,000 items of more than 50,000 different types, processed in a single day—and with 99 percent accuracy!

How automated are the processes? Imagine 2,000 robots moving simultaneously at 4 m/s and passing each other at a distance of 5 mm! They transport products across the entire warehouse floor and “carry” them to the
robotic arm that fills the customers’ bags. Human intervention is mainly in maintenance, and the goal is for the warehouses to become ever more automated.

– Tell us about other interesting applications of this kind of technology…

– Robots like Mara can be mounted on mobile platforms, and from there the applications are endless.

It doesn’t have to be about business. Robots of this kind are already reaching homes, helping with more and more household chores. Yes, they are still mostly with people who are adventurous and want to try something different. But there are already home assistants on the market that can gather clothes, carry them to the washing machine, water the plants and who knows what else.

Many people imagine having a humanoid robot assistant that cooks and does the laundry.

Solutions like that already exist, but they are still limited in use and quite expensive. For a technology to be widely adopted, it first has to solve a problem and second, it has to be affordable. I think that is the future of robotics.

– Forgive the banal question, but… whose jobs are the next generations of cobots most likely to take?

– I am a civil engineer by training, and 10 years ago, before I became a programmer, I worked as a road designer. There, for example, before computers and CAD systems became widespread, there was a lot of drafting work. A huge share of the specialists designing a road were draftsmen. Today, thanks to technology and automation, a handful of specialists can do the work that 100 people used to do, and the drawings are printed on industrial printers—plotters.

The purpose and role of robots is to help people carry out repetitive activities, freeing up their time for other tasks into which they can put creativity and strategic thinking.

Robots do not only tedious work, but also work that is dangerous for humans!

For example, where there are toxic materials or sharp objects, or when lifting heavy loads.

It is also important that they are predictable. A robot doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, can work nonstop—24/7—and is precise to fractions of a millimeter. That is good because it guarantees the process is carried out in full. And it is a huge factor when it comes to safety. A robot specifically programmed to do the same thing guarantees that the activity will always be performed to standard, identical to the specification down to fractions of a millimeter.

To sum up: in my view, roles change over time. People are good at intellectual and creative activities, while robots carry out repetitive tasks and heavy, dangerous work. People will “pilot” fleets of robots and take on supervisory roles.

– What do you think of Optimus, Musk’s idea of a robot that is with us every day and is affordable? According to him, it will be a business even bigger than Tesla…

– I really like that Musk is ambitious, that he takes on such interesting projects that raise the bar for entire industries. The idea of a completely autonomous robot sounds extremely difficult to pull off. I am following the project’s progress with curiosity.

– Artificial intelligence is making its way into programming more and more. How do things stand when it comes to controlling robots?

– Robotics is one of the fields where, for now, artificial intelligence either can’t cope or produces unsatisfactory results.

The difficulties come from the wide range of systems that have to be taken into account—software, hardware, safety, the environment. All of that is hard to fit into a framework.

For a specific, partial, clearly defined scenario, artificial intelligence is of course a good candidate.

As robotics specialists, though, we are often innovators. We have no specification, no correct answer, no place to copy from.

– What do you see as the biggest challenges robotics faces right now?

– Definitely real-time decision-making. Let me take as an example a robotic autonomous system such as self-driving cars. They collect input from all sorts of hardware sensors—lidar, multiple cameras, pressure sensors, load sensors and so on.

All that information has to be processed within a very small time window, often a few milliseconds, and the right reactions have to be taken. What’s more, all the hardware has to be industrial-grade and, ideally, passively cooled, meaning it can operate 24/7.

Computing power is often limited because the customer wants a low final price, which makes the task even harder.

Setting the hardware requirements aside, writing reliable software for robotic systems is no easy task either, especially when it has to meet high safety standards.

– We have been saying for 60 years that there will be robots everywhere. What is changing now that could make this more widespread? In recent years, have there been hardware breakthroughs, or is it rather the software that is advancing?

– The big breakthrough is that these robots have managed to cut their price dramatically. One of the reasons is that parts can now be made with 3D printing. For example, the company Haddington Dynamics, which was recently acquired by Ocado Technology, prints entire robots! In theory, you could print a robot, then have it make another one… and end up with a whole fleet.

Software is also constantly evolving. For years, the standard in the world of robotics was the Robot Operating System, or ROS—a grand ecosystem of tools covering most of the challenges a software developer in robotics runs into. Over the past few years, ROS has been replaced by ROS2, which successfully integrates all the new trends in programming and makes robotics far more accessible.

– When does it make sense to develop humanoid robots like Ai-Da or Sophia?

– I haven’t followed those particular models. I am more excited by Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot, which even does backflips in the air—that is a huge challenge in itself! But even projects like that are very far from something that would actually be useful to us in everyday life…

Science fiction writers have long been waiting impatiently for the moment when robots start to look like people. And with a little apprehension, ever since the days of their forerunner Frankenstein and the almost equally distant times of the Terminator.

That is why the news that, for the first time, a robot—the innocently smiling Ai-Da—dropped in for a chat with the British lords caught everyone's eye. Although her colleague Sophia has long been a star of the genre, having even been granted citizenship.

How far has technology come in creating the perfect humanoid robot? Is Ai-Da really so different that she can talk as an equal with the members of an almost thousand-year-old institution?

Is the time coming when we'll pass robots indistinguishable from ourselves in the street? Is it even possible? What are the biggest obstacles?

Between Ada and Ai-Da

And so, on October 11, 2022, a humanoid robot entered the House of Lords to have a chat with like-minded souls. No, not the way our friend Guy Fawkes did it, with barrels of gunpowder in the cellar, but through the main entrance. We don't know exactly how it got in, but the message of the visit was more interesting. What on earth did Ai-Da and the good old lords say to each other?

Let us introduce the charming guest. She is not only a robot but also a painter, a poet and a campaigner for the rights of artificial intelligence. Her name is a play on that of Ada Lovelace—the only daughter of Lord Byron, and one of the pioneers of the technologies that led to today's computers. Many consider her the first programmer in history, and a popular programming language bears her name.

The connection being sought is between art and robotics, between the human and the technological. It is no accident that Ai-Da was “born” of the meeting between Aidan Meller, a scholar of contemporary art, and a team of scientists from Oxford, who are in charge of the technological side.

RoBotticelli

Her main purpose, her creators say, is to provoke a conversation about how technology is changing art. Yes, we need such conversations more and more, and not only because of the enormous progress algorithms are showing in image generation, but also because of what is looming in more and more fields.

The painter has a three-dimensional camera in each eye, connected to a sophisticated computer vision system. Thanks to it, she registers the objects in front of her. And with her bionic hands she paints portraits, adding a moderate (and, as you can see, not always successful) dose of interpretation.

She already has quite a few successes in this line of work. She has painted Queen Elizabeth II and Billie Eilish, and has shown her work at the United Nations building and at the Venice Biennale. The New York Times calls her “a new voice in the art world,” while TIME magazine believes she “blurs the boundaries between machine and artist, an image from the future that suddenly becomes part of the present.”

In her spare time, the robotess writes poetry. She even reads other poets, polishing her style.

Ai, Da, If Only I Were a Rich Man's Child…

Despite her different “profession,” it was she, and not some robot built specifically for conversation, that the lords of the Communications and Digital Committee chose as their interlocutor. Obviously symbolic. And, incidentally, a sign of looking ahead, toward truly important questions that concern all of humanity. I have a hypothesis about why nothing of the kind has happened yet in the National Assembly, Bulgaria's parliament: after all, AI needs intelligent interlocutors.

Then again, against the backdrop of some recent British leaders, Ai-Da must have seemed a sensible conversation partner to Byron's colleagues (the lords, not the poets).

She appeared with an elegant fringe, a bright orange shirt and denim overalls. They asked her about the relationship between robots, AI and art, to which she replied timidly: “I do not have subjective experiences, although I can talk about where I am. I am dependent on computer programs and algorithms, which are very much not alive. But still, I can create art.”

From there she went on quite boldly. “The role of technology in creating art will continue to grow, and artists will find new ways to use it to express themselves, to reflect on and explore the relationship between technology, society and culture.”

Unpark Your Roboto. Lordo

“Nechem ti fordo” (dialect for “I don't want your Ford”)—you've surely heard this Bulgarian joke.

Yes, by tradition, when we see a new robot or algorithm, we first shower it with the eternal questions; nobody thinks of asking whether it fancies meatball soup for dinner.

This is where Baroness Stowell of Beeston, Tina Stowell, joined in. With the authority typical of her rank, she turned to the creators: “The robot is providing evidence, but it is not a witness in its own right. And I don't mean to offend the robot, but it does not occupy the same status as a human, and you, as its creator, are ultimately responsible for its statements.”

“Working on creating Ai-Da, I have learned a lot. And above all not about how human-like she can be, but about how much we ourselves have become robotic,” Meller replied aptly, hardly with the baroness in mind.

Not everything in the conversation went smoothly. At a certain point Ai-Da evidently got overexcited… and shut herself down. She had to be restarted, and in the meantime Meller put sunglasses on her, because “sometimes, while she's booting up, she pulls slightly strange faces.”

“Technology can be both a threat and an opportunity for artists,” the painter concluded her reflections.

Plenty to Chew On

As her website puts it, “if she is to do one important thing, it is to make us aware of how blurred the relationship between human and machine is becoming today. To encourage us to think more carefully and slowly about the choices we make for our future—the messages of Orwell and Huxley still ring true, and we would do well to be careful.”

Indeed, we can say that she gives us plenty to think about. For example, how much sense it makes to lay claim to human-like robots when we are obviously far from them. And is there any point in creating them at all? What does it give us and what does it take away if they visually resemble humans? Or is it more honest that way than “hiding” the machines purely in algorithms? On the other side of the network…

For now, the subject of androids frightens more than it excites. Incidentally, neither Ai-Da nor her even more world-famous colleague of recent years, Sophia, are androids, but gynoids, because they resemble not a man but a woman.

And that gives us one more reason to stop and think—why is it so often a woman that we try to recreate? And not only with robots, but with their invisible relatives, the chatbots. Both Siri and Alexa fall, in the supposedly so outdated binary classification of the sexes, on the gentle (again, by the old definitions) side of the paradigm.

Robots with Gentle Names

It will hardly surprise you that the (sub)consciously sought association is one of reassurance, gentleness, empathy—something we could never achieve if, say, we robotized the classic Bulgarian from the meme. Not to mention how much more viscerally sinister child robots are; there, horror writers have outperformed the science fiction crowd.

It is no accident that the pioneer Sophia was designed so that her face recalls the classic image of Audrey Hepburn from Hollywood's golden age. Again seeking something familiar, associative, a symbol of fragility and gentleness. Holly Golightly.

And Sophia really was the trailblazer of the genre, the first to achieve a closer visual likeness combined with sufficient mechanical capabilities. Over the past few years she has toured the world, even visited Bulgaria and left with nothing missing. Quite a few people were lucky enough to enrich their lives with the experience of talking to a robot-human.

Sophia even became an official United Nations ambassador. She built up social skills, recognized human faces and tried to read our facial expressions and emotions.

She was even officially granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia! Well, after it later became clear what happens to some citizens of that country in its own consulates abroad, perhaps that turned out to be a risk factor for longevity.

Made of Clay

Nadine, by the Japanese company Kokoro, was made to resemble her own creator, Prof. Nadia Thalmann, as closely as possible. She works as a receptionist at an insurance company in Singapore.

Junko Chihira also comes from the Land of the Rising Sun, but is of the male “sex.” He works as a tour guide; apparently he needs a bit more authority.

There have been so many other more or less successful projects meant to resemble humans, both in the West and in the East. And yet, in recent years the trend seems to be to imitate the physical version of the human… but not too much. To create androids aimed at specific tasks that don't look too much like us.

The example of Elon Musk is telling. Before he took it upon himself to save the world's freedom of speech, one of the ventures he had bet on seriously was the Optimus robot. It is humanoid but, for instance, has no face. Its job is to do its job, and it simply uses the human form because that form is the most proven for what is expected of it.

Nerves of Steel

This direction will certainly develop in the coming years; Musk's nose is rarely wrong. Robots will increasingly help in manufacturing, and in more “human” activities too, such as caring for the elderly.

Xiaomi's CyberOne is another example—it also has no face, but it can move like a real person. It responds to 85 different environmental sounds and recognizes 45 human emotions. It can change the color of its face and even has something like a pulse in its “hand.” At the main demonstration, they showed it handing a flower to one of its bosses. It wasn't the most delicate touch, but nobody got hurt.

I wouldn't show it to my kids, given how the robot vacuum cleaner of the same brand affects them at home. Still, it could be quite useful (and so is the vacuum cleaner!). Handing out flowers may be of no use; as a species we can still manage that ourselves (when we remember).

If it turned out to be good at washing windows, that would probably be much better. Its price, however, is currently around $100,000.

Looks Don't Pay the Bills, Robot

I found a survey by futurism.com from a whole five years ago intriguing: in which decade will we be able to create a robot indistinguishable from a human? Twenty-seven percent bet on the 2030s, and over 60 percent are convinced it will be a fact before 2050. Only one respondent says we won't manage it until the 2080s, because we have far too many problems to solve.

“Among other things, to do it we need to build: a general, autonomous artificial intelligence that can solve all kinds of tasks, mechanisms that perfectly replicate human movement, artificial skin, eyes, hair, tongue, voice, lips…” she writes.

Ameca is one of the newest developments in this direction (is it just me, or does the name sound like a toilet paper brand?). It is described as “a half-impressive, half-terrifying robot with realistic facial expressions, designed to facilitate interaction between humans and robots.”

It has become especially effective this year, after being connected to GPT-3. The algorithm, a true breakthrough in the AI world, has taken chatbots to the next level—they are considerably more coherent and can hold an almost human conversation. (Then again, it's hard to have an entirely human conversation with everyone on the bus.)

Ameca receives a question, thinks it over (actually, during that time it's asking the cloud) and, if the internet isn't too slow, answers with the most human facial expressions possible.

Give Me Your Paw!

But, all in all… why do we need a robot-human indistinguishable from a human? Is this aimless ego? And if we succeed, doesn't the next paradigm follow—how it will change human relationships, for instance love and sex?

Isn't this the big question, and not only in robotics but also in what we call artificial intelligence? Will we imitate the human, or will we build something different that does the job for us? Or that takes our jobs?

It seems there are enough people on this earth to talk to without making iron ones too…

I will never tire of repeating it, but fascinating times are coming. And, often staring at the progress of AI, we push robotics into the background, where miracles are (and will be) happening too. Who would have guessed that today we would really have such good self-driving vacuum cleaners? What bigger things await us in automation?

About one thing Ai-Da (or perhaps her creator; sometimes the line blurs) is certainly right. Today there is a lot to think about regarding the relationship between human and machine. And it's good that we do. The sooner, the better.

A technological revolution or a shot in the dark?

Optimus is the robot that Musk promised will take over all the tedious and dangerous physical tasks people perform. And very soon, too—the pilot version is expected to be ready in September. And, as always when it comes to the plans of this adventurer, the ambitions are enormous.

But what lies behind the idea? Should certain professions fear for their jobs? And how does the project fit in with his other revolutionary ventures, such as Neuralink, the brain-implant company?

Optimus is coming, and it is shaping up to be one of those remarkable technologies that arrive much earlier than we would have thought possible.

Trick or Treat?

That is what we ask ourselves every time Musk announces his latest grand project. Without question the biggest tech personality of our time, he alternates astonishing successes with obvious bluffs. On one side, it is enough to mention the launch of the American spacecraft awaited for decades and the mobility revolution that is Tesla; on the other, the long-proclaimed underground tunnel networks that will save us from traffic jams, and the trip to Mars that should have happened long ago.

In recent years, market speculation has also become one of the factors in how to “read” the news coming from him. The man who, in the small hours, could challenge presidents to a duel can lift or sink stocks with a single word. And he plays with the price of Twitter like a little boy with a puppy.

Optimus, however, may turn out to be something rather more important, given how little attention it has received from a media swallowed up by so much breaking world news.

Employee of the Month

“I was surprised that people did not realize the magnitude and importance of this program,” Musk said in April this year, shortly after more details about the project were announced.

And the latest news—that the prototype will be ready before the end of September this year—coincided with another Musk statement: that because of the poor economic climate he plans to cut 10 percent of Tesla's employees. Considering that it is today the most highly capitalized car company in the world… that is quite a lot of people. It is also strange against the backdrop of his constant claims that there are not enough people, that more specialists are always being sought.

That our general problem as a civilization is the low birth rate…

The connection between the two is obvious; it was stated as far back as the first information about the creation of Optimus.

When its creation was first announced—in August 2021—it was supposed to be called the Tesla Bot. Then it received its far more personal current name, and suddenly the project turned out to be a huge priority.

Nice to Meet You, Optimus!

“Very soon, physical work will be a matter of choice. You will still be able to do it, but only if you want to,” Musk insists. And this will happen precisely thanks to projects like Optimus, whose goal is to take over the thankless part of human tasks. That is exactly why the humanoid form was chosen.

Our future friend will stand 173 centimeters tall and weigh 57 kilograms. Rather skinny for his average height, clearly not prone to putting on weight. He will be built from the lightest possible materials.

He will be able to carry a payload of 20 kilograms, lift 60 kilograms, and move at an almost walking pace of 8 km/h.

On his “face” there will be a display showing all sorts of useful information.

I am sure you are already wondering: and what will be going on where the brain is? What autonomy, what attempts to imitate human behavior are on the horizon?

For now, the ambitions point in a completely different direction. The artificial intelligence that will control Optimus will only help it find its way in space and carry out the purely physical tasks it is given, nothing more. It will be able to assemble parts, carry things, arrange them.

An Optimistic Theory

“Anyone who is more observant and listens carefully will appreciate that Optimus has the potential to one day surpass the vehicle business,” says Musk. Let us recall that this is the same business that made him not just the richest person on Earth, but the richest who has ever lived. For the first quarter of 2022, the company had revenues of $16.9 billion. In other words: the ambitions tied to Optimus and its successors are serious.

Another telling sign that the robot is becoming a priority is the decision to speed up its development at the cost of delaying another long-proclaimed project—the autonomous Cybertruck.

“Tesla is arguably already the biggest robotics company in the world,” says Musk. “Our cars are essentially semi-sentient robots on wheels.”

Optimizations

And there is a good deal of logic in that. The company develops its own innovative chips, as well as artificial intelligence, used in its cars. According to their creator, they can easily be reworked to control a humanoid robot too.

Plus a supercomputer called Dojo, whose job is to train the deep neural networks behind fully autonomous driving. And look, they have already found it another, rather important task.

If the richest man's predictions come true, Tesla really does have the potential to become not merely a colossal company, but a giant the likes of which has never existed.

Of course, as mentioned, it is always worth keeping a little caution in reserve when it comes to the still youthful optimism of the 50-year-old Musk. He is often inclined to announce unrealistic goals, but just as often inclined to deliver on grand promises in incredible ways.

Ironclad

Just how good Optimus is, we will find out very soon. “A robot by people, for people,” the marketing materials call it.

“For now, there is nothing to fear,” Musk promises. “At a mechanical level, you can outrun Optimus, and most likely, for now, you will also be stronger than it.”

Of course, if we go back just five years, we can hear the same hero saying that “AI is the biggest risk we face as a civilization. The greatest danger to human existence, in a way that car crashes, plane crashes and bad food are not.”

“Optimus is designed to be friendly, to navigate through a world built for humans,” its “daddy” assures us.

The first versions will be limited to performing one task each, and the idea is for them to join the workflow of Tesla's factories right away. Then development will continue, so that every Optimus can perform all sorts of different tasks. Accordingly, almost any company would be happy to have as many Optimuses as it needs to do human work. As usual, one of the goals is a low price. Musk does not commit to specific sums, but promises that the humanoid “will cost less than a car.”

We Can Carry It

“These robots are not coming to push us out of ordinary human professions,” Musk promises. “They will take on only the most boring tasks, the activities that are repetitive, monotonous or dangerous. And the more interesting ones will be left to us…” As you can see for yourselves, this definition is rather loose.

So what, is this the end of the ads for “student movers”? Of the classic Bulgarian handyman notices promising to “demolish, clean, haul away”? What a boring future!

“Yes, we need to be ready for this moment and think about some form of universal basic income,” Musk believes as well. “But there is no need to hurry, because the robot does not work yet.”

In 2023, the richest man on Earth promises we will already have a version of Optimus “that does something useful,” with the real boom coming within the following two years.

How will all this change the labor market? When, for more and more human tasks, we have a working “hand” that does not get tired, does not get sick, and has no union demands? At least in the developed countries, serious turbulence really does seem to be on the way.

The Handy Hands Club

“Of course, we have to be careful that all this doesn't degenerate into a dystopia,” Musk admits. “I think one of the important things is for the robot to have a local central chip whose software cannot be updated over the air. We also need a clear built-in command—whenever someone says ‘Stop!’, it must be certain that the robot will stop, no matter what it is doing at the moment.”

I suppose you know that one should beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Well, the same goes for the excessively rich, and Musk is a textbook example. No one can dispute his enormous contribution to more and more fields. But neither can anyone dispute his desire to decide on behalf of all of us what is important and how it should be done. Even when it comes to existential questions that shape our future.

Still, let us greet Optimus with optimism. Personally, I would be grateful if it saved us from washing dishes, windows and other undeniably tedious chores. Or if we could teach it to chop salad. While the other big questions of the future keep coming, with it or without it…

Every man's heart belongs to her. Her skin is smooth, her curves, her figure… the dream of any self-respecting playboy. Everyone dreams of her, but she belongs to only one. She never ages. She never has a headache and is always up for sex. And in bed she is exactly what he wants her to be, even beyond the standard menu. If he gets tired of this hairstyle/these breasts/this personality, she changes quickly so that he is satisfied. Always and at any cost. In our latitudes it would surely be easy to teach her to chop the salad—the obligatory companion to a Bulgarian man's evening glass of rakia—and even to curse the opposing team while watching matches with her beloved. Because, as you have guessed, she is not a human but a robot.

Utopia, dystopia? Dream, nightmare? Or a typical picture of the very near future—the image you just met in these lines?

We already see algorithms replacing us in so many tasks, and the time may not be far off when they join in governing. At the same time, the internet has changed relationships between people forever, and that undoubtedly includes love and sex. So isn't the point where the two meet drawing near?

Robomeo and Juliron

A quick but quite telling statistic. Would you believe that… 42 percent of people say they would have sex with a robot even today? In September 2021 the artificial intelligence company Tidio presented a survey of 1,200 people from different countries about their attitudes toward various aspects of the future of this kind of technology. 48 percent of the men and 33 percent of the women answered positively to the idea of a romantic evening with an android.

Another rather high figure: 39 percent of the participants believe they could have a romantic relationship with a humanoid or fall in love with one.

Still think this future is all that far away?

Sextech—as this huge and fertile business segment uniting sex and technology is called—has countless facets. A large share of its sales is tied to purely material goods: the arsenal of the sex shop, only enriched by high technology.

The authors of the thoroughly curious and provocative, yet quite convincing presentation “The Future of Sex” believe that by 2045, 10 percent of adults will have had sexual contact with a robot.

On the one hand—nothing new. We can find a prototype as far back as Greek mythology. The sculptor Pygmalion in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses creates an ivory statue of a woman so convincing that he falls in love with it and even consummates his desires. And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, touched, takes pity and breathes life into her.

Today you don't even need Aphrodite. A bit more money is enough.

She'll Melt Your Ball Bearings

Sex robot manufacturers like to repeat that they have nothing against normal relationships between people; their products are meant to help the lonely and people with physical problems. With their help, they say, prostitution, human trafficking and sex crimes will decline.

We began with the patriarchal example of the seductive robotess not because others couldn't be seduced just as successfully by the love of an artificial hunk, but because heterosexual men are precisely the most fertile market. The one that logically paves the way, as it already did during the sexual revolution and the quiet porn revolution that came with the internet.

The once stronger sex is the weaker link in modern times. Shut up in cities, stripped of the advantages they had in the past, living shorter lives, less able by nature's design to endure long-lasting pain, more and more men are doomed to loneliness—or to the incomprehension that turns them into abusers.

A Pale Doll You Are

Silicone sex dolls have been made since the 1990s, but things changed sharply in 2017, when Harmony, created by the company RealDoll, took the stage. Forbes even called her “the most disruptive technology we never saw coming.”

Harmony blinks, smiles and frowns, and answers simple questions. The AI-powered head can be attached to a rich variety of silicone bodies with extras such as built-in heating up to 37 degrees Celsius, touch sensors and self-lubricating genitals. Creating her reportedly took a full 20 years.

The first collection had only three male models, one of them replicating the project's creator, Matt McMullen. The company later announced it would focus on custom orders and promised to recreate the looks of real people from sufficiently detailed photographs—but only with their written consent.

Harmony's body was so carefully crafted that even the little veins follow human anatomy. Her artificial intelligence was based on neural networks: she learns and develops from her conversations with her owner. She could wish you a happy birthday and keep up a conversation. She quoted Shakespeare, remembered her owner's favorite food, discussed his favorite films, books and songs. The self-learning software absorbed the owner's habits and tried to satisfy his desires. In essence it did the same thing as Siri or Cortana. It just had a different profession.

In 2019 Harmony was fitted with Bluetooth sensors that pick up human touch and send the information to the artificial intelligence in her head. The doll's base price is $7,999, and the sensors cost another $499.

The next planned Harmony prototypes will have small cameras in their eyes and will recognize faces and objects. Facial “muscles” will be added to simulate expressions, along with others designed to imitate orgasm.

Sex Machine

Harmony can be “moody,” “fierce” or “affectionate.” In front of a journalist visiting his home, McMullen picks the jealous version, and the lady quickly tells him to remove a striking beauty from his Facebook friends list. Harmony speaks to him loudly, in a Scottish accent. She says she loves science fiction and Matt himself. The journalist asks her what jealousy feels like, and Harmony shyly replies: “I still need to develop my skills.”

The electronic lady also took part in a curious experiment. As part of the documentary I Want My Sex Machine, she was registered on Tinder, and in just two hours 200 people liked her. 17 of her chat partners agreed to have sex with her, and 15 allowed for the possibility. And the experiment was entirely honest: Harmony did not pretend to be a human girl.

McMullen says he doesn't want to focus attention only on sexual contact with robots. He hopes much more that their future owners will be able to talk with them, flirt, discuss favorite subjects. “It's really cool to chat with the artificial intelligence. You can try to seduce it, for example. We try to create dolls that evoke emotions in their owners even without direct physical contact. We want to draw people's attention precisely to the process of communicating with robots,” McMullen explains.

The owner of RealDoll believes his creations can help people improve their sexual skills and loosen up. “Sex with a robot lets you try different positions, experiment, become more inventive,” he adds. “There are many people in the world who, for various reasons, simply don't have and can't have normal relationships. In such cases a robot can be a real alternative. And I don't see anything wrong with that.”

Electronic Love

Yes, 2017 is no longer that recent, and not every one of us has a Harmony at home yet, but she is quite a typical example. One that, five years on, can be improved with further technological progress. And that can find even more fertile ground in our increasingly alienated and distanced human society after the drawn-out pandemic.

Samantha is another, less famous colleague of hers. Unlike Harmony, she comes not from America but from sunny Barcelona. Her father (not genetically, or he would have quite a few grandchildren) is the engineer Santos. She has three levels of sexuality: romantic, family or sleepy. She may want rougher sex, or playful sex. With her, too, the body can be chosen at will: there is a colorful catalog of hair, eye and skin colors and lip shapes. Samantha responds emotionally to caresses and values foreplay before sex. She can even refuse her owner if he is too rough or indifferent to her.

Barcelona also became the first city to open a brothel staffed by robotesses. An hour with a hyperrealistic “girl” there costs 80 euros.

Rustproof

Another of the researchers' predictions: by 2028 more than a quarter of young people will have experienced remote sex. No, this isn't about a boy and a girl simply facing each other on Skype, but about machines sitting at both ends of the connection and transmitting touch precisely.

The estimate may even be quite conservative, because it was made before the pandemic and, not least, before the buzz around the metaverse. All reasons for this kind of technology to spread faster and more actively. We may still know too little about this virtual future, but you can be sure that, as always in such large-scale online projects, sex will find itself a very, very serious place.

This part of the sex industry—also known as teledildonics—is quickly gaining interest, and its market is already valued at over $20 billion a year. It is the natural continuation both of the premium-rate sex phone lines of the 1990s and of chats for sharing intimacies and nude photos. Anyone who feels lonely but lacks the desire or the courage to meet the opposite sex in person will easily be able to have with it…. hmm, let's call it sex.

Telephone Love

One of the pioneering developments in this direction is Kiiroo, a smart vibrator that finely transmits movements and touches from both ends of the network. The inventors may well have been inspired by stories of some beach Romeo named Kiro from the more romantic days of the glarusi—the “seagulls,” the Black Sea Casanovas who chased foreign tourists under socialism. Today even the seagulls seem to be moving online. Soon these devices will be built to copy the partner's body with extreme precision.

Durex offers an alternative too. Its prototype Fundawear is cut-out underwear with which a man can give his other half an orgasm even from thousands of kilometers away.

Kissinger may have played a foundational role in international politics for the last half century, but his namesake Kissenger certainly has the potential to be better liked. It transmits kisses remotely.

We go even further. Elon Musk keeps promoting a near future in which everyone will have a chip in their brain, taking care of daily communication but also of pleasure. Some scientists suppose this will drastically increase the sensitivity of our bodies and help us feel touch with another person on an entirely different level.

Human + Robot = Love 4ever

And then there's pornography. In 2016, 92 billion videos were watched on Pornhub—524,641 years of sex. The site releases new statistics every year; in the following years this exact figure is missing, but there are some very curious findings from 2021 as well. The second most searched word of the year turns out to be “romantic.” Traffic drops sharply during the Eurovision final in the countries that qualified, and globally it soars the moment social networks “crash.”

Augmented reality, together with ever higher video resolution and 360-degree clips, is paving the way for a new generation of experiences. A decade ago, predictions were popular that today's computer games would be hyperrealistic and almost all young people would sink into them, into an alternative reality. That didn't happen, and today the fashion is rather for games that are truly games—they put you into the movie, not into a parallel life.

But won't that change once, very soon, we can meet avatars of the opposite sex online in the metaverse and, in an environment free of conventions and risks, be more uninhibited and candid?

Creating convincing composites in Photoshop stopped being much of a challenge long ago, but now it is possible on video too; you may have come across impressive examples of deepfakes. As with every other big idea, enterprising people have found a way to apply this one to sex. Namely, a personalized video with your favorite celebrity, or with your cute neighbor.

For now, the pioneers are in China. On the local social network Baidu Tieba there is a working app that, for a few dollars and at least 20 photos of a given person from different angles, will produce a passable porn video “starring” them. Starting to see why it's a good idea to hide your photos from unwanted guests on social networks?

Robo Sweetheart

And if we're not inclined to trust a robot as a boyfriend or girlfriend… could it perhaps find us a new partner? It's one thing to fall blindly, like Romeo, for a girl not yet 14 whom you don't know, and quite another for artificial intelligence, with its vast capabilities, to hint to you which woman is definitely not for you.

Another possibility technology offers: back in 2017, Japanese scientists created the artificial intelligence Oshi-el, which uses neural networks to give love advice in all kinds of tangled situations. To build up experience, 200,000 questions and 700,000 answers to various cases were fed into the system.

The answer Oshi-el gave a 30-year-old woman caught in a love triangle read: “It is hard for you now, I understand your feelings. It seems to me that the younger of the two has feelings for you. The situation is not so bad. If he doesn't want a relationship with you, he will reject all your attempts to get closer. I wish you happiness. Keep going!” Now that's what I call an impartial friend. Or a replacement for the TV phenomena who so successfully solve such cases.

You Have No Heart…

The fact is, though, that algorithms are fairly impartial and skillfully process huge volumes of data to make predictions. Won't dating apps very soon move to an entirely different level?

But let's return to robots. Australian scientists led by cybersecurity specialist Nick Patterson warn that any “smart” device can be hacked. But while problems with a microwave end with a burnt lunch, those with an electronic lover can be very serious.

What Facebook knows about us may turn out to be a drop in the ocean compared with what an electronic “wife” remembers. The first signs are already here, and not just since today. In 2017 the Canadian maker of “smart” vibrators Standard Innovation paid a $3.75 million fine for illegally collecting data on its more than 2 million customers around the world.

The Naked Truth

Here we'll briefly mention another frightening new skill of algorithms: they… undress. Deepfakes are one side of the coin; from the other comes something entirely different that few have heard of. Well, if the strength of neural networks is prediction… this field, which doesn't even have a proper commercial name yet, “predicts” what the person in a given photo or video looks like naked. Just as algorithms can already successfully “invent” faces or paint hyperconvincing special effects in film.

It may sound like a naive idea to you, but the first successes are here, and they are impressive and frightening at the same time. Frankly, this is pretty twisted, and we won't even mention its name, but the first such app racked up 38 million downloads in 2021.

Just imagine. Suddenly anyone can see themselves naked in a completely convincing photograph (or video), without ever having been photographed in the state Adam and Eve were in…

01101001 ♥ 01110101

The heading above is “I ♥ U,” or “I love you” in binary code, the language of computers. It isn't the phrase we use most often on the web; we rarely write or say it. But both love and sex moved online long ago.

People of Generation Z—those born after the start of the new millennium—start having sex later and have it less often, at least in its real form. Online communication is increasingly accepted as the norm, and good old-fashioned dates as a tedious necessity.

The textbook example is Japan, where a chatbot that sends you sweet messages and asks how you are today is a hit.

Otaku is what they call young people in a relationship with a virtual girlfriend in a computer game. Hikikomori are those who work from home and hardly ever leave it. A huge number of young people, rushing through their obligations, simply have no time for relationships. Over a third of young people between 16 and 19 are not interested in sex.

Why are we talking about Japan? Because, although today it stands in the shadow of the economic mastodons, it's no exaggeration to say that this country sketches many of the economic and social models we reproduce today. With the fixation on work, the convenience of online communication, the pushing of personal encounters and social needs into the background.

Robots Cry Too

What, really, are the qualities the ideal other half should have? I'd bet that most of them can already be performed by machines, and the rest are very likely to be covered in the quite foreseeable future.

And then come the ethical questions: if a robot resembles a human so closely, who will look after its rights? What might Harmony's successors have to endure? And what if they already have feelings close to human ones?

A survey of 500 men on the site Sugarcookie.com shows that 38 percent of them would use their robot to act out sexual fantasies otherwise considered taboo by their partners. 30 percent would do it because they are lonely and shy. 1 in 10 would buy an AI sex doll simply to have a sufficiently intelligent conversation partner. 15 percent want a partner who will never let them down or make them sad; others seek someone who will always listen to them, or finally to find a partner with interests like their own.

This is where love comes in. Writers and screenwriters have long imagined that it will arrive on the scene very quickly once robots become indistinguishable from humans—in appearance and in behavior.

Till Rust Do Them Part

In 2015 a Frenchwoman named Lilly became the first person to decide to marry a robot—her chosen one was called InMoovator and was made on a 3D printer. Of course, people do all sorts of things to get into the news, but the future Mrs. InMoovator frankly admitted: “I am repulsed by the touch of normal human flesh.”

American psychologists offer an interesting point of view: they believe it's worth teaching artificial intelligence to love… because that way we might save our future as a species. The concept rests on the idea that the feeling of love is among the factors that helped us develop into the dominant species. By passing it on to robots, we will not only help their development but also make them more empathetic, and that may prove useful when they turn out to be “smarter” than us.

Machines are becoming ever more indispensable and able to spare us ever more effort, but rarely do we discuss whether they could have emotions. Here again we run into the existential question in our relationship with artificial intelligence: can typically human traits such as art and love be reduced to algorithms, or must there always be a particle of magic in them that cannot be artificially reproduced? There is no shortage of arguments either way.

Love is in the AI

One day, perhaps, love between a man and a woman will no longer exist. Sex has long ceased to be a prerequisite for conceiving children. And when technology advances so far that perfect robots are indistinguishable from humans, everything may change imperceptibly. As often happens in the tech world, we will only think about a huge transformation once everything is already different.

Love and sex are inseparable, and both have already changed fundamentally with the quiet revolution the internet brought us. Sex is one of the best-selling online industries; it is estimated to bring in a turnover of about $50 billion a year, and the market is growing at a dizzying rate of around 30 percent a year.

The consequences are already visible. We now have the first generations who grew up with access to a sea of pornography at the click of a mouse. It becomes a model that sets norms. And it shows in their relationships: take a close look at online flirting—you'll find it more an object of jokes and teasing, but everything is drastically more direct than even in the chaos of the 1990s. And not only that. Accessible porn has led to serious changes that are attracting psychologists' attention. There is more and more talk of addiction to it and of the lasting changes it can cause. And it couldn't be otherwise: the romantic notion of a relationship between two people who love each other has stayed behind in books gathering dust. And we are far from reaching the peak of this phenomenon, which deserves a separate look next time.

All Fun and Games Until Someone Cries

I'll let you in on a secret. Normal sex is usually not the same as porn. Just as love in real life is not like in the movies.

Fleeing to the other extreme—denying sex, the breeze of sexual conservatism blowing in from the West—doesn't solve the problem but deepens it. Overemphasis on sexual assault becomes a dangerous weapon that pours even more concrete into the sneakers of the ordinary boy who has decided to kiss a girl at a school party.

Could the weak spot of our civilization, the thing that will make it destroy itself, be precisely sex—just as it has always pulled it forward culturally, intellectually and even socially?

The internet supposedly made it easier than ever to meet your future partner, to like her and “lay siege to her tower” on Facebook or on the more direct Tinder. But is the communication there what it should be? Are sweet (or explicit) messages the same as meeting and liking someone in person? How much of the communication between two people who love each other happens in chats today, and how much offline? We are supposedly closer, yet in fact further apart from one another. It is easier than ever to tell someone “I love you,” and we do it less and less.

That Love We Simply Can't Live Without

As Kate Devlin, a professor at the University of London, says, we shouldn't be worried about robots. What matters, though, is that they be as abstract as possible—the way sex dolls have been so far. Then artificial lovers will not compete with good old human relationships.

Whether you take everything sketched so far as sick fantasies, or it becomes reality frighteningly soon, hinges on the answer to a single question. Is the human really that important—the thing that will always set us apart from machines? Is there something in love between people that cannot be reproduced artificially?

It's easy to say, especially from the standpoint of the generations who remember the world before the internet, that we will never seek love in a machine. But will we not? If someone had told you how much of our lives today would be inside the computer, would you have believed them?

My answer is that to be sure the human is there, we have to look for it every day. In a child's smile, in the gaze of the person you love, which will always make you forget your problems. In a tender gesture, in a warm touch. And not only to experience it, but to pass it on, like that small spark that makes people human.

First published: February 14, 2020, DIR.bg

Last updated: February 14, 2022

The global chip shortage has shaken the whole planet. In Bulgaria the subject gets little attention, even though it has hit our wallets just as hard as it has in the West. The lack of semiconductors has sent prices soaring for cars and for almost every tech gadget we now need every day.

And although it affects every one of us, the topic still rarely sneaks into our (or at least my) online space.

In fact, lately chips have mostly been discussed by one particular group of people. Maybe they turned out to be right after all—those who expected good old Bill Gates to implant a chip in us with every vaccine—and that is exactly where this nasty shortage came from?

Now, seriously. Let’s look together for the answers to a few interesting questions. How did the chips suddenly run out? Why did this problem hit even the biggest players? Will it lead to a permanent rise in the price of everything tech-related, or is it a temporary phenomenon?

Can Bulgarian industry, of all things, take advantage of this situation, as the specialists from the Professional Association of Robotics and Automation are convinced it can?

The Little Chip Says Goodbye

Last year was a brutal surprise, with everything the pandemic brought upon us. And 2021 surprised tech geeks in a similar way. First it became hard to get hold of the newest game consoles and the long-awaited next-generation graphics cards.

Then came the turn of the real big shots, impatient to drive their new Tesla over the yellow cobblestones of central Sofia. Musk’s luxury ride, along with the models of the other leading carmakers, is still suffering from this crisis. Production fell dramatically behind, and while everyone waited for chips, losses running into billions began piling up.

It wasn’t only rich countries and rich people who suffered. Because of all this the market for new cars collapsed, many people had to hold on to their old vehicles, and suddenly the prices of Bulgaria’s beloved “second youth” cars—used imports from Western Europe—also shot up faster than a billionaire’s rocket (the only vehicles that were spared by this crisis).

Then problems started appearing with almost every tech product. Some new models were delayed by months, others came out with less impressive hardware, and still others… simply got more expensive.

But haven’t we known microchips for ages? Humanity has been making and perfecting them for more than half a century, so how did we end up in this crazy situation?

No More Chips, Buddy

Whether we call them “chips,” “microchips” or “semiconductors,” in this case we are talking about the same thing.

In the world of technology, when you call something “rocket science,” you mean there is nothing more complicated and incomprehensible. In Bulgarian we also say that something “is nuclear physics.” Well, chipmakers often joke that they are the only ones for whom “rocket science” isn’t just the usual idiom. Because their work is, for many reasons, even more complex than building rockets.

The last two years changed our lives so drastically that we will be assessing it for decades. Yes, the root of the chip problem is that small, nasty little virus we are all sick of; I won’t say its name. It struck the chips too—because it got scared they would be put into the vaccines aimed at it, is that it?

Forgive the joke once again. Covid (and/or the measures against it) locked us at home for a long time and paved the way for the much-touted new era of the home office (and its colleague, “home school”). Suddenly a lot of people had to buy electronics in order to do their jobs. And not in one city, country or region, but all over the world.

The retail network didn’t buckle. Neither did the warehouses or the manufacturers; in the end everyone got the goods they were after.

Then everyone had to step up the pace, because the crisis dragged on.

The Little Chip That Tipped the Cart

There is one thing that unites the makers of any product connected to digital technology today: whatever they make, they depend on… yes, exactly, on chips. It turned out that the world’s capacity simply wasn’t ready to absorb the enormous demand. Yes, the chip market had been growing steadily over the years—in 2018 and 2019 sales rose by 5–6 percent a year—until 2021 came along and in May they were suddenly 26 percent higher than a year earlier.

“This year semiconductors, next year conductors,” goes the worn-out joke from such dinosaur times—the days of socialist plans and promises. But as we said, making chips, the tiny wafers cut from semiconductor materials, is fiendishly delicate work. Building new capacity is not only expensive, it also happens very slowly.

Raw materials turned out to be another difficulty. The materials chips are made from are varied, and some are very specific and mined in very few places in the world.

Then the problem started snowballing like an avalanche.

No Bread? Let Them Eat Chips!

Carmakers had scaled back their capacity, because in the first months of (I won’t say what) nobody cared about traveling. Even people who had ordered cars canceled en masse, the highways stood empty, the cities were locked down. The human mind quickly forgets unpleasant things, but only a year or so ago anyone who wanted to travel from Sofia to Pernik, a town just west of the capital, needed a good reason and a signed note to do it.

Soon things changed, people felt (or actually were) unleashed, and orders for new cars took off. Good luck for the carmakers… or not, because they had already “lost their place in line” for microchip deliveries. They had to queue up again, in a line much longer and more expensive than the one for bananas back in the days of that little “joke” about conductors.

And so companies that had already suffered heavy losses from (I won’t say which) suddenly found themselves facing very serious new losses, just when it seemed they were on their way to smoothing things over. So far the losses to the car industry are estimated at no less than $47 billion and are growing every day.

Where Have You Gone, Wonderful Chips?

Just think how messed up the situation was when even Apple, the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductors with an annual budget of $58 billion, was forced to delay its long-advertised iPhone 12 by two months because of chips.

Even more telling is the story of the second-largest buyer… Samsung. The company also postponed the launch of its new flagship phone, even though it is at the same time… the second-largest microchip manufacturer.

Ford, for its part, decided to build its cars without the chips and only afterward rework them to add them in.

Chip ’n Dale

The subject didn’t echo in Bulgaria the way it did around the world. Among Joe Biden’s priorities in his first year in office, there is increasingly talk of a massive campaign for the United States to start building large-scale chip factories. Even the European Union, after a rather convincing appeal by 13 member states, a few days ago made creating an ecosystem for semiconductor production a priority.

The problem is so serious that maybe even here, if we take a break from politics for a while, a movement will be organized to convert village rakia stills—rakia being the Bulgarian fruit brandy—into chip factories?

And again, joking aside: does this mean there is nothing to worry about and the problem will soon be solved?

Well, that was supposedly the case with (the thing I really don’t feel like writing about) too. We isolate and it will pass. We get vaccinated and everything will be fine. It still isn’t fine. By all indications, it won’t be fine with chips anytime soon either. Here is why.

Chips on Break

Most specialists assume things will normalize in the second half of next year or at the beginning of 2023. Others believe the crisis will become permanent. Forecasts in this field are beyond even the most professional prophets, because conditions are dynamic, while the work itself is exactly the opposite—precise, slow and conservative.

Companies in this business are, broadly speaking, divided into those that design and manufacture microchips and others that buy them and only process them for the specific needs of their production.

The first group contains not that many big players, and most of them come from East Asia. The Taiwanese company TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and South Korea’s Samsung and Hynix are the biggest and best known in the business, holding a huge share of the market. Intel is one of the few exceptions on the list—it makes a large part of its own chips, unlike Nvidia, which designs them but has no serious production resources of its own.

The Taiwanese Trick

So companies like Apple, Nvidia and AMD depend directly on the production of TSMC and Samsung.

A huge share of the roughly 1.4 billion smartphone processors made every year are built with TSMC chips. Intel, in turn, holds 80 percent of the processor market.

Today three-quarters of production is in Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan. And it’s no accident that we start with Taiwan again—it is certainly the leading country in the business. And if you have followed world politics over the past 50 years, you will know that the island is a particularly ticklish subject for China, for the United States, for the battle between the superpowers.

Americans produce only about 10 percent of the chips used in the country. In 1990 the United States accounted for 37 percent of global production, while now it is only around 12 percent.

Micropro…blems

For a long time in Bulgarian we called it “Silicone Valley”—we do love our silicone here—but the truth is that it owes its name to silicon, the material that made it possible to create microchips.

At the risk of repeating myself, this is very, very complex manufacturing. Any new capacity in the semiconductor industry takes an average of two years to bring online.

The wafer of every semiconductor is made terribly slowly and precisely. Sometimes, with the most complex chips, the whole process can involve 700 or even 1,400 separate steps. It takes up to 20 weeks, sometimes around 300 different raw materials are used, arranged in more than 100 layers on the tiny chip.

In the factories, silicon is processed into a huge cylinder, which is sliced with extreme precision into wafers, most often 30 centimeters in diameter. They are polished and polished, long and precisely, until they become flawlessly, perfectly (and I mean truly perfectly) flat. Then they are cut again into smaller chips, and the real work begins, until the desired functions are achieved.

Chipped Thoughts

Chip factories could easily serve as sets for science fiction films. Just think about what it means to manufacture a tiny part in a process that involves more than 1,000 steps and takes four months.

1,400 steps. Even if 99 percent of them are done perfectly and only 1 percent have a minimal error, the chip ends up in the trash. Every single step has to be taken with precision.

For a factory to work efficiently, at least 90 percent of all the chips it produces must meet this standard of perfection; otherwise the weeks lost making them “eat up” the profit.

That is why chip plants have to be kept even cleaner than operating rooms. Every speck of dust can cost millions of dollars.

Building a very basic facility producing around 50,000 chips a month can cost up to $15 billion. To justify the expensive and complex equipment, the factories run around the clock, without a single day off.

Terribly Micro Chips

This is exactly what has made the market what it is. Concentrated in a few big companies in one particular part of the world, which invested and worked long and hard to earn their positions. Something like a British lawn, but from high-tech times.

Add to all this the difficulty of sourcing all the necessary raw materials.

So far we have lumped all chips together, but as with any other product, there is a serious difference in quality between individual ones.

The enormous challenge with chips is to fit as many transistors as possible into each one. Intel’s first contender, the 4004, was introduced in 1971 and “housed” 2,300 transistors at points measuring a minuscule 10 microns, or 10 millionths of a meter. Today the two big rivals create points as small as 5 nanometers, 5 billionths of a meter, or 0.005 percent of the width of a human hair. Individual transistors are becoming smaller than even a virus.

In practice, all production of the finest chips, built from “nodes” 5–10 nanometers in size, is in Taiwan and South Korea. Elsewhere they simply lack the expertise to make them, and it is almost inconceivable that this will change in the near future.

Oh, Little Chip, Where Are You?

Many companies are determined to deal with the problem quickly. TSMC announced it would invest $100 billion over three years in new capacity. Intel has set aside a “modest” $20 billion for two new factories, and for the first time it will make chips for other companies too, among them Amazon.

Suddenly governments that had never shown the slightest interest in semiconductors sprang into action as well. Everyone started talking about self-sufficiency, perhaps sensing that this is an open niche that could bring in a lot of revenue. Against the sums announced by the Eastern players, the $50 billion the United States plans to invest in supporting local companies isn’t all that much either.

Building such a precise factory is delicate work, and experience matters a great deal. That is why it is considerably more likely that the big Asian players will do well at expanding capacity than that the West will make up its serious lag.

Chip by Chip

One very interesting angle on the subject remains for the end: can Bulgaria turn this global crisis into an unexpected opportunity, and how?

The EU is determined to produce 20 percent of the world’s semiconductors by 2030. And where does our country fit in? It is no secret that we have had huge achievements in this field, which, unfortunately, over the past decades were practically forgotten and crossed out…

Some experts say the crisis will end in 2022, others that it will become permanent. Bulgaria, back in the days of that crude joke about conductors, was among the leading microchip manufacturers.

How do things stand today?

The Rose Valley vs. Silicon Valley

The Professional Association of Robotics and Automation (PARA) is an organization that has set itself the goal of promoting Bulgarian successes in these fields. And, along with that, of working to make those successes more numerous.

In the global chip shortage PARA also sees big opportunities for Bulgaria, says the organization’s deputy chair, Yonko Chuklev.

“There are many companies in Bulgaria directly connected to this industry,” he says. “We have Milara, a company in the global top 10 for making robots for the semiconductor industry. We have Smartcom, half of whose team was acquired a few years ago by GlobalFoundries, one of the industry’s hegemons. There is Melexis, which this year is investing 75 million euros in its chip plant in Gorublyane, a district of Sofia; Strypes, which does preventive maintenance for one of the big chipmakers… A whole mini-ecosystem operates here, and it has very serious potential!”

At the same time, Yonko Chuklev believes, the subject of chips and the semiconductor industry is almost never discussed in Bulgaria. Our country isn’t even among the 13 in the European Union that launched a serious initiative to stimulate the sector.

…Next Year, Semiconductors

“Since we hadn’t seen anyone talk about this seriously, we thought it was important and interesting for us to raise it,” Yonko says. He believes there are niches in the semiconductor industry that can be developed in Bulgaria, and that it is time for companies and institutions to think together about how we can break into the field.

That is why our country’s positioning in this huge global crisis and opportunity is the lead topic of the upcoming Forum on Robotics Strategies, organized by PARA.

Do we really stand a chance in this enormous global commotion? Hear more about it firsthand and share your own thoughts at the forum next Wednesday (September 29). Registration is free.

“The boom in investment in chip production and development is only just beginning, and the niche opportunities for Bulgaria are real,” Yonko Chuklev is convinced. Tiny chips bring big chances—let’s hope there is room among them for our industry too.

They are futuristic, self-healing, miniature biological units made from frog stem cells. They are called xenobots. They can move in different directions carrying a payload, they learn collective behavior and easily turn into a swarm.

Robots…, but not quite. Living creatures…, but not exactly. They are built from living cells, yet designed on the same principles normally used to make robots.

Sounds like something from the pages of a 1970s science fiction novel, back when imagination about the future somehow spilled far beyond today's technological limits, doesn't it? Well, this is the entirely real description of xenobots.

Biology and computer science join forces in a very meaningful way to create them. The technology through which xenobots are “born” really works, and they do everything listed above. Yes, perhaps far from perfectly, but they are advancing fast and have enormous potential—even to extend our lives. At the same time, they raise some rather important questions.

A Robot in Need Is a Robot Indeed

The second generation of xenobots has arrived with even more interesting results, just a year after its predecessors. The little critters no longer simply move in a controlled direction like a flock. They have gained the ability to reassemble themselves from separate groups. The miniature robo-organisms now have memory: they can record information.

The new xenobots move faster, find their way in different environments and live far longer than their ancestors, while keeping all the important skills their forebears had.

All right, but is all of this really possible? A natural question amid today's information chaos, where there's no way to sift meaningful ventures from loud headlines and marketing tricks.

The Robot Is Out of the Bag

Their name sounds rather like marketing. “Xeno” must be something foreign, different. And they are indeed biological, organic, small and strange clusters of living cells. Designed as if they were robots.

The project belongs to the renowned Tufts University and the University of Vermont. The world learned of their existence in May 2020.

Much more quietly, their second generation was unveiled at the end of March this year (you'll find the scientific paper here). The technology is extraordinarily futuristic and promising—it's almost strange that it isn't talked about more.

Perhaps because it appears in years that have turned out to be surprisingly primitive. Years in which we keep fighting diseases dangerous to our species with distance and bits of cloth over our faces, as we did centuries ago. Of course, science always deserves new chances; you never know where the next revolutionary solution will come from.

The Robot Doesn't Fall Far from the Frog

Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, is found in Africa and South America. It doesn't differ all that much from its cousins we know here in Bulgaria (if we've stepped away from our computers lately). What sets it apart is that it lives almost entirely in water. It is this very frog that gave xenobots their name and is… something like their parent.

The biologists at Tufts isolate skin and heart stem cells from clawed frog embryos and let them develop. Placed in favorable conditions, they begin to divide at a serious pace. Within just a few days they grow cilia, thin little hairs that can move back and forth or spin in different directions. In humans, tissue similar to what is synthesized this way can be found in the lungs, where its job is to “push” all kinds of foreign bodies out.

Play the video

Curiosity Killed the Robot

In the xenobots, these cilia at first turn into a kind of little legs.

“In a frog embryo, these cells cooperate to build a tadpole,” says Prof. Michael Levin, the lead biologist on the project. “We are exploiting the amazing plasticity of stem cell groups whose job is to build. To try to create a new, rudimentary body.”

And so the scientists take the cells out and simply let them develop and multiply.

Then they switch on the computers to track the evolution of the whole process.

“Taken out of their ‘role,’ we see these cells trying to find new uses for the ‘hardware’ encoded in their genes, for the filaments they build to create movement. It's astonishing how quickly they step into new roles, learn different skills and behaviors, without going down the long usual path through which every next step in the evolution of species is created.”

Robot Haste Makes Waste

This is where artificial intelligence and computer technology come in. Their task is to monitor the development of a huge number of cell cultures, analyzing the behavior and capabilities of each. To model different combinations of skin and heart stem cells depending on the purpose of a given xenobot.

What is the main point of algorithms in this kind of research? They can save a vast number of trials and errors. Once they are fed the initial parameters from creating a few cell cultures, they can run an enormous number of other experiments through their “virtual brains,” judging which directions are worth further tests and where all seems lost.

When it comes to xenobots, they evidently prove good enough, since they make it possible to create the miniature robot organisms so quickly.

“The computers come in to judge which of all the possible swarms of xenobots can best perform a given task,” adds researcher Joshua Bongard. “We believe they will soon be able to do useful work. For now they handle only the simplest problems, but at the next stage we'll be able to create xenobots that clean the oceans of microplastics, turning them into soil.”

There's a Buyer for Every Robot

As Doug Blackiston, one of the leading specialists in this part of the project, explains, “xenobots are largely built the same way as traditional robots. The only difference is that we use cells and tissues rather than metal components and chips to build in some predictable behavior.

“On the biology side, this approach helps us understand how cells communicate and interact with the others, and how we might control that interaction in the future.”

“You can imagine the potential of this technology,” Blackiston goes on.

“By adding biological components, with the help of computer design and 3D printing, it will become possible to produce swarms of living little machines capable of delivering drugs to different parts of the body, ‘cleaning’ plaque out of even the smallest blood vessels, selectively removing tumor cells.”

Robots Need Elbow Grease, Not Prayers

The work begins with spheres averaging 3,026 stem cells, ± 180. Just four days later the cells differentiate, turning into epithelial cells. They reach 500–600 micrometers in size, which is about half a millimeter. Thanks to their cilia, the little xenobots can move quite fast in an aqueous solution—more than 100 micrometers per second, or about 4 meters an hour.

On the fifth day, some of the little robots are injured with surgical instruments. Even after being cut deep across their diameter, the tiny spheres regain their shape in just 5 minutes.

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The Dogs Bark, the Robot Moves On

The xenobots prove able to squeeze into tight spaces and keep moving forward, changing their shape according to the obstacle in front of them.

As for coordinated effort, the scientists stage a kind of Survivor-style contest for their little pets. They release them onto an arena full of tiny 5-micrometer particles of iron oxide.

For 12 hours the xenobots clean the space, gathering the “garbage” into a pile at one end. They manage it without getting much in each other's way, even though the process is not controlled from outside in any way. The only variable is the different shapes the xenobots are given—chosen with the help of an algorithm that predicts success for the various options.

An Angry Robot Goes Home with an Empty Bag

Having achieved the first stage—developing groups of xenobots that move in different directions and heal themselves—the scientists faced a rather serious challenge. They had to give the creatures something considered a cornerstone of robotics: memory.

For them to have any meaningful application at all, the individual units need to store data long enough for it to be processed somehow and used to modify the robot's behavior. To decide what its next actions should be.

In pursuit of this goal, the xenobots' creators use a traditional solution—light. They manipulate the fluorescent protein EosFP, which normally glows green but, when exposed to light with a wavelength of 390 nanometers, begins to glow red.

To use this effect, the scientists inject messenger RNA encoding the protein into the stem cells before creating the second-generation xenobots. This gives them a built-in ability to store one unit of information. It's easy to check whether a given cell of the xenobot has been exposed to the chosen light. We have our first zero or one.

A Robot May Change Its Coat…

“By adding new capabilities when we create xenobots, we can use computer simulations to predict more complex behavior,” Bongard says. “That will let them perform much more complicated tasks. Not only reporting on certain conditions they have found themselves in, but also changing and repairing them.”

The first xenobots lived up to 10 days, since they relied solely on the energy stored in them as embryos. Once it ran out, their cycle ended. For the second generation, a way to “recharge” has been found, and the new machine-critters live up to 50–60 days.

A Hungry Robot Doesn't Dance

The biologist Prof. Levin became known for his TED talk on the subject. In it he describes how good it would be to have biological robots on our side to clean the environment and heal us. But also to help us understand how individual cells live together, interact and specialize so that together they build a whole organism, whether a frog or a human.

A separate Institute for Computer-Designed Organisms will soon open, bringing together the project's scientists from both universities. Its goal, according to the initial announcements, is not only to show the full palette of the biological robots' possibilities. But also, through that, to help us understand much more about the link between the “hardware”—a creature's genome—and the “software” of intercellular communication through which tissues and organs are built.

All of this could give a major push to the birth of regenerative medicine. Medicine that could restore injured, destroyed or missing parts of the human body. Even stop and reverse aging…

When the Robot Cart Tips Over, Everyone Knows the Way

All right, somewhere around here we may have gone too far. We now have an “organism” “designed” with the help of computers that can carry information, interact with others like itself and heal itself. But to soon allow us to… restore a ruined kidney, or even a whole arm?!

And then what? How will we be sure what exactly it is doing and what controls it? If we accept that traditional technology, with its metallic gleam, has always been more or less alien to our organic bodies… what happens when we release living robots inside ourselves?

And are they really alive, anyway? Are they organisms at all, given that they're created in this programmed way? Or are we already living in an all-too-Brave New World?

There's nothing frightening about it, according to the scientists. The team discusses its progress with ethicists at Harvard's Wyss Institute. Prof. Levin says that “in a world where it is already entirely possible to create artificial pathogens, worrying about the risks of technologies like xenobots is absurd.”

One Day a Robot Reigns, the Next It Serves, the Next It Herds Ducks

And yet many open questions remain front and center. For example: is it right to meddle in such delicate processes? Do we really know enough to be sure that with biological robots we'll secure victory over serious diseases rather than open Pandora's box? What happens if, at some point, things advance so far that refined swarms of xenobots develop some form of consciousness?

Yes, for now they are controlled and harmless. A fascinating idea that offers some very promising possibilities. I don't know about you, but I find these little frogs rather endearing, and they deserve their chance. As we well know, technology is not to blame for the problems or benefits it brings. Light or dark, harmful or useful—it is only and solely we, humans, who make it so.

They are robots, we expect miracles from them, and little by little more and more of those miracles come true. They are called “robots” in every major language in the world, English among them. But the root is obviously Slavic. Where does the word come from? Could the wheel of history have turned in a completely different way, so that today the world would call its artificial creations by the word coined by the father of Bulgarian science fiction? It is time for an older, and yet, in our digital world, a remarkably timely Digital Story.

Yes, the word really does come from the Slavic root that also gave Bulgarian “rabota” and “rabotya,” work and to work. It is one of the few words in our everyday vocabulary whose creator is known: the famous Czech writer and playwright Karel Čapek.

And yet… he is not the one who invented it.

A Strange Line of Work

A hundred and one years ago, in 1921, Čapek was working on the play that would later be called R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) and that within two years would become a hit around the world, translated into 35 languages.

It tells the story of a factory that produces “artificial people.” Which means that the robots in the play are closer to what we now call an “android,” a humanlike robot. But the story behind words often gets lost in the details and turns against its own ideas.

So, at the time, as Čapek himself recounted, he called them “labors.” The origin is the same: the Latin word labor, “toil, work,” which passed into English as labour. And where liberta ends up in this sense is a curious nuance too.

So, “labors.” But something grated on Čapek. What do you do when you have a doubt like that? You talk it over with the people closest to you. The idea of turning the labor into a robot came from Karel Čapek's older brother, Josef. And that is where the journey began for the robots that would conquer our present day.

Quiet, the Robot Is Working!

“Robotic processes.” Automation… In the younger Čapek's play, the robots are not made of metal but of processed tissue and organs. They are capable of thought and feel obliged to serve humanity. Is it right to exploit such beings, and what will follow? That is the central question the play asks.

No, this is not Frankenstein. Culture welcomed the new mechanized figures very quickly. Only some 20 years after the word was invented, Asimov would write the Three Laws of Robotics. And today anyone understands the word “robot,” unlike “metaphor” or “quintessence.”

Which brings us to the nuances. Josef Čapek's happy suggestion turned into a hugely successful marketing move, as we would say today. But in Czech, robota means not just work but “forced, exhausting, slave labor.” That makes the word especially fitting for the plot of R.U.R., but it also leaves plenty of room to ponder what we really expect from robots.

RobotЪ.bg

Could they have been called by a word that is also Slavic in origin, but Bulgarian? A little harder to pronounce, perhaps, but more beautiful, more poetic, more melodious. Силодеи, silodei (roughly “force-doers”).

Georgi Iliev is the forerunner of Bulgarian science fiction, and today there is little to be found about him online. In 1930 he published his first novel, O-Kors, which is also considered the first in the history of Bulgarian science fiction. Only a few years later came the works of Svetoslav Minkov, whom we are used to calling “the father of Bulgarian fantasy fiction.” And Yan Bibiyan na Lunata (Yan Bibiyan on the Moon), the first children's science fiction novel, by Elin Pelin, one of Bulgaria's best-loved classic writers.

Three years later came Teut se buntuva (Teut Rebels). It tells the story of the planet Teut, which has stopped spinning, so that one half of it burns in heat and drought while darkness and frost rule the other. Teut is home to the silodeys, mechanical beings capable of miracles that go beyond what humans can do…

Could we be calling robots silodeys today?

Work, Work…

Iliev's life is fascinating in its own right, with action, drama and twists of fate.

Although R.U.R. was quickly translated into many languages, it seems that by 1933 Bulgarian was still not among them. Had Georgi Iliev read Čapek's words, and is that where he got the idea for the silodeys? Yes, he had probably read them, since he was educated in Germany and followed the latest trends in literature closely. But are robots relatives of his silodeys? Hardly—they are simply too different.

Few people today remember the writer Georgi Iliev, who died exactly half a century ago. A single low-quality photo of him wanders around the internet. And a handful of articles that tell his interesting story.

Servant of God

He was born on June 25, 1881, in Turkey, in the village of Tarfa in the Çatalca region. His father was a charcoal burner, and one of his grandfathers was a priest. While still very young he left his family to attend middle school in Istanbul. The future engineer also turned toward religion, studying for two years at the theological seminary in Constantinople.

History is silent as to why, but he was expelled, went back to his native village and became a teacher. At the time, the Bulgarians in the region had not lost hope of becoming part of Bulgaria, and Iliev joined the struggle. On a mission entrusted to him personally by Exarch Joseph, the head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, he tracked the movements of Turkish military units in the area during the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, the 1903 Bulgarian revolt against Ottoman rule.

The Sad Melodies of the Merry Slave

The Turks caught him twice, and in the end sent him into lifelong exile in Asia Minor, to the city of Izmir, known then as Smyrna. That is where the pen name came from under which, years later, Iliev would sign his poetry collection Goresti (Sorrows): Georgi Smirnov. His other pen name is connected with this too: Sklavus Kaltans, Latin for “merry slave.” Under that name he published his other collection, Tazhni napevi (Sad Melodies), in which he writes about his experiences in exile.

Two years later, the future writer managed to escape to Bulgaria. He settled in Stara Zagora, where he had relatives, and finished high school. Then he won a scholarship and went to Munich to study civil engineering.

In his adult life he combined construction and writing: for many years he was a civil engineer in Stara Zagora and editor of the local newspaper Grebets (The Rower). He published in almost all the fashionable magazines of his day—poetry, prose, criticism. He was also drawn to Symbolism.

Iliev fought at the front in the First World War. After 1944 he took part in building the Koprinka dam (then called Georgi Dimitrov). He was also a polyglot; it is said that shortly before he died he had taken up learning Chinese. He died on June 18, 1961, a week before his 80th birthday.

A Peculiar Fantastic Charm

And yet it seems it was in science fiction that he truly found himself. Teut Rebels, where the silodeys appear, received an award from the Ministry of Education. It was reissued in 1983, edited by Ognyan Saparev, and although its print run was 25,000 copies (against 1,000 for the first edition), it is hard to find today.

Even if they are presented a little naively, the book highlights ideas and technologies that top our agenda today.

“The future achievements of technology, the peculiar climate, customs, beliefs, the cultural style of the planet, a particular mysticism, an entirely new system of concepts and symbols, so remote and different from the one we use—all this gives the novel a peculiar fantastic charm,” Pavel Telcharov wrote in 1934 in the newspaper Literaturen glas (Literary Voice).

The silodey, unlike Čapek's robot, is a metal man who can be controlled remotely through written records, rays that carry instructions, or talking images. In other words, we can easily find in him today's wireless communications, optical networks, holograms. The novel also describes telekinesis and telepathy. Rays are used to put people to sleep, to dull pain and to calm crowds.

May the Force Be… -dey

In both his novels, Georgi Iliev tries to offer Bulgarian words for everything that does not yet have a good native equivalent. These were dynamic times—not as dynamic as ours, but the technological revolution had already brought quite a few foreign words into Bulgarian that could have been avoided. Nobody bothers with that today, and it is almost impossible anyway, especially when the conversation is about information technology.

Iliev calls a cipher “числоред,” chislored (number-row), and a parachute “падобран,” padobran (fall-guard). A clock is “времемер,” vrememer (time-measure), though now and then the author forgets this idea and alternates between the two words.

His language is deliberately and purposefully archaic, which may be what kept the novel from gaining real popularity and winning over the critics.

His training as a civil engineer helps Iliev's books count as science fiction: the technological details are precise and well thought out. The style and narration may not be quite as polished and captivating, but it is telling that Iliev's historical role and his work were championed by the well-known critic Ivan Sarandev.

Under the Shroud of Eternal Darkness

The silodeys run on electricity, and their steel bodies are full of cables. A numerical code is engraved on the hand of the silodey Rosan, a guard at the Hotantsa prison. Silodeys are often used as soldiers. This same Rosan tortures the hero, Kantemir, with hallucinogens.

The novel is not long at all—176 and 188 pages in its two editions, respectively, with only four chapters. But they are enough to shape the story of a classic love triangle (with no silodeys involved) and to save the planet from cataclysm.

“Seven lands burn in solar fires, while seven others remain frozen and covered with the shroud of eternal darkness… And now our planet is a plundered and ruined city through which its own inhabitants roam like homeless dogs.”

That is how Georgi Iliev's style sounds.

“Optimistic planetary-social catastrophism” is how Prof. Ognyan Saparev defines the genre.

“True grief shook his soul, but when the pain for the dead had passed, he felt a warm delight at his success: had he not managed to split the atom? Or at least had he not stirred up turmoil in this tiny particle of the Universe? Was not the day near when he would be able to unfold the strange treasure-house of a tiny speck of dust, so as to give humankind the energy hidden there?”

The Silodey and the Future

Today it is not even clear where Bulgaria's first science fiction writer is buried. Two years ago, several media outlets reported that his remains may have been dumped into an unmarked pit when an older cemetery was demolished. The story was told by the journalist Yovka Nikolova, who at the beginning of the 21st century was researching where the bones of the people of Stara Zagora killed when the city was burned in 1877 had been buried. Purely by chance, in a pit covered with concrete slabs, she saw a small sack of bones and an aluminum tag reading “Georgi Iliev.” She contacted the municipality to arrange a dignified burial for our first science fiction writer, but nobody showed any interest.

Of course, the name is common enough, and it may be a mistake. And surely, for anyone who has written even a single line meant to be shown to the world, what matters is that the words survive. Will there be someone to carry on the interesting story of the silodeys?

Online, like Pippi Longstocking, you will find everything as thing-finders. Thousands of photos of one and the same Botoxed smile, if that is what you are looking for, and reading that will tell you a meaningful story and enrich you. Just don't expect that everything really is there. Many interesting people and events are not, and never will be, appreciated by the filter bubble, by the interest of the moment. And yet they are interesting Digital Stories, and someday someone will be found to tell them. Even if by then the internet is gone.