When reading Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) today, one is astonished how full of contemporary or even visionary ideas the text is —100 years after its conception. These include the societal implications such as robots taking away jobs, the issue of robot rights, the dangers of automatic killer machines, or robots taking over the world.

In this short talk, I will concentrate on a different aspect, which is no less contemporary: Rossum’s Robots are still ahead of the capabilities of today’s machines and I think that this is grounded in an ingenious scientific understanding of the problem that Čapek intuitively came up with. In short, I will claim that the second generation of Rossum’s robots has achieved the transformation from soulless robots to self-aware machines by a form of enaction: through the addition of pain and irritability, the robots started to care about their bodies and eventually “themselves”, enacting a world of their own.

Bio

Matej Hoffmann received his MSc degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence from Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2006. Between 2006 and 2013 he completed the PhD degree and then served as Senior Research Associate at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Prof. Rolf Pfeifer). In 2013 he joined the iCub Facility of the Italian Institute of Technology (Prof. Giorgio Metta), supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (iCub Body Schema, 2014-2016). In 2017, he joined the Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague where he is currently serving as Associate Professor and leading a group focused on cognitive, neuro-, collaborative, and humanoid robotics.