Exploring the Humanoid Robot Collection on the Fabric of Digital Life: A journey into the past and future

Imagine walking into a hospital and being greeted by a nurse who is a robot, or visiting a store where a humanoid robot greets you at the door. Now envision those robots clad in lab-grown living skin engineered to give them a more natural smile. Rapid advancements in AI and robotics mean this scenario is no longer the work of science fiction. From healthcare to customer service, machines are taking on roles, and appearances, once thought to be uniquely human. As humanoid robots continue to rise in capability and become part of daily life, we must ask ourselves: What will the rise of humanoid robots mean for the future of work and society, as well as our relationships with technology and each other?

The answer to these questions lies in the Fabric of Digital Life’s unique collection, curated by Jayden Cooper: Humanoid Robots (1927 – 2024). The work continued on this collection in the summer of 2024 by archivist Minoo Yazdani.

Fabric is a digital cultural database that serves as a museum of sorts, preserving and archiving artifacts that can be used to trace technology from sci-fi beginnings to consumer production. Starting with the iconic sci-fi film Metropolis, produced in Germany in 1927, to today’s Optimus – Elon Musk’s real-life robot named after the fictional Transformers character – the collection reveals how technology has transformed from fiction to reality. This single collection helps us keep track of technological advancements giving insight into future possibilities.

For example, Fabric documents humanoid robots like Grace, which was used to test out the ability of socially assistive robots to alleviate seniors’ isolation at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital during the pandemic. Grace, a robot nurse created by Hanson Robotics, has been emerging as a functional robot since 2020 and one can find several artifacts about it in the Humanoid Robot collection.

Fabric is used in academic research to monitor developments in AI and robotics, leading to research questions, such as how can the road to designing social robots for older people use human-centred values rather than allowing emergence to occur through acquiescence to a better than nothing social scenario? The platform is also used to provide an academic public dataset to support academic research with curated collections investigating the problems of privacy and data governance.

Unique to the Humanoid Robot collection are the augmenting keywords, which reflect on existential concepts such as creating, expressing, feeling, living, surviving, being and bonding. These are identified as an evolving posthumanist thread that highlights how our understanding of humanity is being shaped by the use of humanoid robots.

Although the future of this emerging technology holds countless possibilities, from synthetic humans to super intelligent hive mind AIs, this collection reveals likely outcomes based on current inventions.

Fabric’s Humanoid Robots (1927 – 2024) collection provides a glimpse into the evolution of robots from science fiction to reality, tracing developments from early imaginings to modern innovations. The rise of humanoid robots is set to redefine our world and this digital archive offers a way for those who explore it to consider the ethical and societal implications that may lead to policy to guide future developments.