It’s a rarely discussed global phenomenon, but people are beating up, dismembering, and destroying robots. Nobody knows exactly why this is happening. Anti-robot violence is a disturbing trend that continues to grow as robots become more immersed in human society.

Experts contemplate the reasons why people are raging against the machine. One possibility is the overwhelming anxiety over job losses, estimated to affect over 375 million people by 2030, caused by robots entering the workforce.

Another possibility may be the natural human tendency to fear outsiders. Robots may look and act somewhat like us, but they are not us. Frederic Kaplan at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland wrote that this increasing unease between man and machine may occur because we are so similar.

Kaplan wrote, “We see ourselves in the mirror of the machines that we can build.” As the public does not fully understand these eerie humanoid robots, people are driven to acts of violence.

10 Hitchhiking Robot Found Dismembered

The HitchBOT was a child-sized robot with a bucket-shaped body, yellow boots, blue foam limbs, and a charming LED smiley face. It was created for an interesting psychological test—not for the robot but for the humans it encountered.

HitchBOT’s stated goal was to see whether robots could trust humans. As it wasn’t capable of moving from place to place on its own, it relied on the help of the strangers it met. The robot’s audio and visual hardware allowed it to see humans and converse with them. It also had a sense of where it was at all times and constantly took photos of its surroundings.

This adorable little guy was an international adventurer and social media star. It successfully hitchhiked across Canada in less than four weeks. It also journeyed through Germany and the Netherlands without a scrape. It spent a week as a groupie for a heavy metal band and explored the winding canals of Amsterdam. Its next stop in the United States, however, didn’t go so well.

HitchBOT was a mere one-year-old when it was mugged in the “City of Brotherly Love” and beat up beyond repair. Vandals tore off its arms, threw them on the ground, and started kicking the robot. Nobody knows who ended the robot’s journey or why, but the creators aren’t pressing charges. They released a statement simply asking the world, “What can be learned from this?”^[1]

9 Destroyed Sex Robot

According to a recent survey of heterosexual men, 40 percent wanted to buy a sex robot in the next five years. Some experts suggest that the popularity of interactive sex robots may reduce or even replace traditional prostitution and thereby decrease sex trafficking as well.

Brothels with this new class of robotic sex workers have already opened in countries like Spain and Ireland. It is an industry with a lot of potential to rake in some serious dough. That’s why there’s so much effort toward making these sex robots look and act realistically.

At the Arts Electronica Festival in Austria, Sergi Santos unveiled his doll, Samantha. This doll is intelligent in that it can reply when spoken to and it moans when touched in sensitive places. Santos’s robot, which was worth almost $4,000, was molested at the show.^[2]

Santos said, “The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs, and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.” He referred to the perpetrators as “barbarians” in his outrage over his creation being trashed by these nonpaying vandals.

8 Harassing Self-Driving Cars

Even self-driving cars are being abused in all kinds of bizarre ways. In Chandler, Arizona, 21 incidents of this type of harassment have been documented by the police department in just two years. Some people are engaging in verbal abuse, throwing rocks, slashing tires, or chasing these cars down the road. Clearly, some individuals do not want cars driving for them. Perhaps by attacking them, they believe they are standing up for the human race.^[3]

Arguably, the most shocking of these incidents was when 69-year-old Roy Haselton was standing on the side of the road as a self-driving car rolled by. His immediate, guttural reaction to the autonomous vehicle was to pull out his gun and point it directly at the van.

One week later, he was arrested. His .22-caliber revolver was confiscated, and he was indicted on a felony charge for disorderly conduct with a weapon. The eerie encounter was captured in the video posted above.

7 Funeral Held For Robot After Violent Beating

The rivalry between the soccer teams of England and Russia is no joke. During a 2016 match in France, fans from both countries ended the event in a bloody brawl. So, in Moscow, a robot was created to protect fans at the FIFA World Cup and make them feel more secure. The friendly robot is named Alantim.

In a promotional video, Alantim says, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, I’ll protect you. I promise to escort you in Moscow and keep you away from any problems.”

Alantim speaks both English and Russian. It helps with information and directions. It even entertains. The robot is able to contact the police instantly, but its most advanced feature is an ability to predict conflicts from the surrounding crowd before a situation escalates.

Before the robot could fulfill its purpose, a man viciously charged Alantim with a baseball bat. He kicked it to the ground and bashed in its head while the robot pleaded for help.^[4]

Sadly, Alantim could not be revived after the attack. This incident prompted Olga Budnik, a spokesperson for the Muscovite tech hub Phystechpark, to create the world’s first robot cemetery. She didn’t want to simply plop the robot parts into the trash bin, so she made a space for people to be able to say goodbye.

Budnik said, “Alantim was a really good robot. It was supportive, always polite, always happy to see you. You know, like a pet.” Alantim was worth about $10,000.

6 Children Abuse Robots, Too

As children are helpless in so many ways, they get a frantic thrill from being in control. It turns out that this includes a lust for violence against robots.

This desire for dominance is a hindrance in places such as schools, hospitals, museums, and shops where robots will need to interact with children in the near future. So, scientists and psychologists are working together to create a robot that children don’t want to beat up.

With this motivation in mind, researchers in Japan conducted a social experiment in a shopping mall by observing children with a human-sized robot. When children became aggressive, the robot responded to negative physical contact in a humanlike manner. Still, they mercilessly bullied the robot in a fit of laughter. The researchers wrote:

We observed serious abusive behaviors with physical contact such as kicking, punching, beating, folding arms, and moving (bending) the joints of robot’s arm and head. [ . . . ] Some children frequently obstructed the robot’s path regardless of the robot’s utterance requesting for the children to stop the obstruction, covered up the robot’s eyes with their hands, and beat the robot’s head.^[5]

The researchers interviewed 23 children, all under age 10, who had just abused the robot. Curiosity, enjoyment, and peer pressure were the biggest motivators. But the researchers discovered something quite upsetting about the kids’ perception of the robot.

The majority of children did perceive the robot as a humanlike being, while only 13 percent saw it as a machine. This means that they recognized that the robot seemed to be experiencing pain and stress, but they didn’t care. They were in control and having a blast.

5 Security Robot Smeared With Feces

In San Francisco, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was using a 181-kilogram (400 lb) Knightscope K5 security robot to patrol the streets around their campus in an effort to prevent the homeless from sleeping or loitering there. The SPCA believed that the robot was reducing crime and needle debris around their campus.

However, the K5 angered a lot of people who felt that this was an unfair attack on the homeless. The robot was knocked over, veiled with a tarp, and had its sensors blinded with barbecue sauce. Someone even smeared feces all over it.^[6] As of early 2019, hiring a robot for this job appeared to be more cost-effective at about $6 to $12 an hour than the minimum wage of $15 per hour for a human in San Francisco.

4 A Robot Built To Withstand A Fight

Engineers are racing to see who can create the toughest robot that can really take a beating. This quality is in high demand these days. In Tokyo, the Robust Humanoid Robot (aka RHP2) was built to take some serious punishment. It’s a human-sized, bipedal robot that is run by electric motors (soon to be a hydraulic system).

This robot is unique because it will always stand up again no matter how often it is knocked down. Like the film character Rocky said, “It ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” Once knocked down, the robot pulls itself up again every time—just like a human.^[7]

There is a lot of (expensive) damage that can happen to a robot when it topples over. Just like a cat has the instinct to right itself during a fall, RHP2 has been programmed to fall in a specific position. It’s also built with a metal frame to protect its innards.

3 Assaulting Pepper

If you thought WALL-E was the cutest robot around, then you obviously haven’t met Pepper. It is human-sized but a little on the shorter side with a mermaid fin for a leg. Between the adorable voice, sound effects, little cartoon smile, and big blue eyes, it’s hard not to fall in love.

It’s also programmed to understand and respond to human emotions. A tablet attached to its midsection is used to demonstrate how it’s “feeling.” This robot assistant sold out in just one minute.^[8]

However, some seem to be immune to the robot’s charm. While shopping in a SoftBank Corp. store, a drunken customer kicked and beat up Pepper in a whirlwind of fury. This particular Pepper clone moves a little slower these days but is otherwise all right.

2 Torturing Pleo The Dinosaur

Pleo the dinosaur is a lovable toylike robot that was created to be both beaten and cuddled in psychological experiments to test human empathy for robots. A workshop presented Pleo as a plaything at first. People quickly grew to adore his trusting eyes and endearing noises as he learned to move around the table.

When Pleo is first pulled from the box, it can’t walk or do anything. Its caretaker teaches it about the world through play, with some hugs and tickles sprinkled in.

After an hour of innocent bonding with Pleo, the participants were asked to torture and kill him. Weapons were spread out on the table, including knives, hammers, and hatchets.

Kate Darling is the laughably ironic name for the robot ethicist who conducted these studies. The workshop mentioned above was just for fun apparently. The actual science involved people watching videos while their bodily reactions were monitored. The result of the workshop, however, was more dramatic than even Darling had anticipated.

It’s not the same as taking a defunct copier machine from work and beating it up with a baseball bat because we’re talking about a new kind of machine: the social robot. It’s meant to evoke your empathy. So it’s no wonder that people couldn’t harm it despite their logical brains telling them that it was just a stupid robot. One participant stood with hammer raised, frozen mid-swing. Eventually, they just decided to pet Pleo instead.^[9]

Then Darling told them that they could save their dinosaurs by killing someone else’s. Still, nobody moved a muscle. Eventually, she announced that one Pleo had to be sacrificed or all the robots would be slaughtered. That’s when one man grabbed a hatchet and gave a single fatal blow to one of the dinosaurs.

The room fell silent. Everyone was surprised by their intense emotions. If you are curious as to how you’d react, check out the video above. Without even getting to know the robot’s endearing side, it’s still almost too much to handle.

1 Kicking A Robot Dog

Boston Dynamics, an American engineering and robotics design company, released a video that unexpectedly stirred people’s emotions. It showed employees repeatedly kicking a doggie robot they named Spot. It was supposed to demonstrate the robot’s resilience and balance, but viewers saw it as downright cruel.

PETA jumped on the bandwagon by releasing a statement that said, “Most reasonable people find even the idea of such violence inappropriate.” Even Elon Musk chimed in and said that it’s probably unwise to kick a robot. He said, “Their memory is very good.”^[10]

The video posted above sparked a lot of interesting discussion about robot abuse. Is kicking a robot like Spot desensitizing people to violence and making them more likely to practice abuse in real life? Or is it a useful outlet that may divert such cruel behavior? Nobody really knows yet.

More than a few alarmists will tell you that artificial intelligence and robots are going to rule the world in the future. Eventually, we can expect them to do everything from washing our clothes to fighting our wars, with little to no human help except for teaching them how. With machine learning, they may not even need us for that. The artificial intelligence of the future could be more than capable of knowing what to do before we do.

What many don’t know, however, is how artificial intelligence technology is already realizing what we’ve generally assumed to be the distant future. Not only that, but the AI of today can do things that we never imagined it would be capable of even in the future. Not all of these things are scary or alarming, though; a lot may genuinely end up helping us in the long run.

10 Write News Stories

Despite the “AI will take over jobs” worries, there are certain careers that we generally believe will be safe from that takeover, as there are some occupations only people can do. Journalism is definitely one of them, as it takes a human mind to effectively report important information in the form of coherent and well-structured articles for everyone to easily understand. Or so we think, as bots that can write a story as well as a competent journalist already exist.

While there have been attempts to make bots that can write news stories in the past, none of them have been good at it, presumably due to AI’s inherent limitations in doing so. Not anymore, as The Washington Post has already successfully deployed a story-writing bot that can write as well as any of its best journalists. It’s called Heliograf, and all it needs to churn out news pieces are some phrases covering all the potential outcomes of a newsworthy event—like the elections—and a database of events to take the latest updates from.^[1]

9 Work As Cops

Most of us have seen RoboCop, a fictional story centered around a cyborg cop that envisions what the future of law enforcement may look like. Except RoboCop isn’t fully robotic; he still has a human brain, which, combined with robotics, turns him into a deadly fighting force.

Many have assumed that robotic cops will be a thing at some point in the future, though we didn’t know that future would be here so soon. Dubai has already put an operational robot serving as a part of the police force on the streets and has creatively named it “Robocop.”^[2]

If you think this Robocop isn’t capable of much, you’d be wrong. It was developed with the help of Google and IBM’s supercomputer Watson and can do things like identify criminals, flag problematic vehicle plates, report unattended bags in public areas, and much more. It’s a part of Dubai’s plan to have 25 percent of its police force be robotic by 2030.

As of now, there’s no plan to arm these things, and we’re not really suggesting that the Robocops would pick up guns and rise up against the humans at some point. The technology may even end up being a massive aid to understaffed police departments around the world.

8 Make AI Software Of Its Own

A lot has been said about the unimaginable things AI will be able to do in the future, though if you’re a coder, you’ll know that making it do those things is a lot harder than writing about it. AI developers aren’t just some of the brightest and most talented developers in the world; they’re also among the most highly paid due to their scarcity. It’s quite difficult to write AI software, which is why it’s such a big deal when an AI learns to do just that.

Many firms have meddled with AI designing machine learning software of its own, but it was never better than that of human AI developers until fairly recently. In 2017, Google designed an AI that could design its own AI, and for the first time, the AI it created turned out to be better at a task than software made by the same AI researchers. They used the AI-generated AI to mark locations of multiple objects in a picture and then compared its perfermance to their own AI made for the job. The AI’s software had an accuracy of 43 percent, against the 39 percent of the software the people created.^[3]

In case it’s not clear, this means that AI might someday take the jobs of those who design AI as well.

7 Lying And Cheating

We consider deception to be an inherently human trait, something that machines absolutely can’t do unless they go completely rogue. While we have previously designed AI software that can lie and cut corners, there had been no case of machines learning to do so on their own. That was until some cases of it doing exactly that hit the news over the last year, and, let’s be honest, it’s a little scary.

In one case, researchers tried to get an AI to play Sonic the Hedgehog as a part of their AI retro gaming competition. The conditions it was supposed to meet were simple: Just pass the level as quickly as it could and keep an eye on its competitors in case they overtake. To their surprise, it quickly learned to do that by glitching through walls, which is possibly the first case of an AI learning how to cheat at a game without being designed to do so.^[4]

In in another case, involving research by Stanford and Google scientists, an AI designed to convert aerial Google Maps images to street maps was found hiding some of the information in an undetectable, high-frequency signal.

6 Teamwork For The Greater Good

The ability to work with other people is the basis of human society, and it gave us an edge over other, more self-serving creatures in our early days. Of course, that’s not just restricted to wholesome activities like building farms and cities; teamwork also played quite an important role in wars and conquest. It’s therefore natural to assume that if the machines learn how to do it, that’s both an “aww” moment and something to be scared of.

Luckily (or unluckily) for us, AI now has the ability to do just that. Google’s DeepMind project has developed an AI that can work with other AIs in multiplayer games, like Quake III Arena, to win the match, something that it has been trying to get to work for quite some time.^[5] While AI has proven its ability to beat human players at video games before, this is the first time it has done so working within a team, which is rather difficult for AI to do, as it requires compromising and matching up with the play styles of other players.

5 Write Poems

If robots could write poems, the world would largely be the same, as outside of a handful of successful poets who do make their living out of it, it’s not a real job. (Sorry.) Poetry requires an understanding of meter, rhyme, tone, and other things that only a human mind can appreciate, and it’s rather difficult for an AI to learn how to do those things without being explicitly taught.

As it turns out, though, AI is already writing poems most of us wouldn’t be able to distinguish from human-made ones. Take this Shakespearean masterpiece written entirely by a bot as an example:

When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade
Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn
The daytime shadow of my love betray’d
Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form

Now, an AI didn’t just wake up one morning and make this; an MIT PhD candidate, J. Nathan Matias, taught it the basics of sentence structure and syntax. It took quite a few bad attempts before the AI came up with something original and poem-like.^[6]

4 Create Art

Another occupation that we believe is safe from being eventually replaced by machines is that of an artist. It’s one of those jobs that you really can’t do without a human brain, as good art can only be effectively made and judged by a human eye. It requires our sense of perception, depth, and shadows, and unless AI can figure that out anytime soon, there’s really no chance machines would be able to do it.

It’s pretty bad news for all the aspiring artists out there, then, that AI has already figured out all of those things and more. In a 2015 experiment by scientists from the Bethge Lab in Germany, they taught their AI to learn the various elements that go into a piece of art and then coded it to replicate that style by painting an image from a photograph. To their surprise, the AI was able to replicate a street in Germany in Van Gogh’s signature style, with a perfect understanding of shadows and types of strokes.^[7]

3 Learn How To Encrypt On Its Own

If there truly were to be a global AI takeover, one of the things the AI would require to be successful is the ability to encrypt its own messages. Even then, regardless of whatever encryption techniques an AI could come up with, it’s safe to assume that we would be able to find ways to decrypt them, as we designed the AI in the first place. That is, of course, a very simplistic view of potential ways AIs can take over, though encryption techniques of their own certainly won’t hurt their chances.

As it turns out, AI has already found ways to encrypt messages on its own. In one of Google’s AI research endeavors in 2016, they set up two neural networks, Bob and Alice, trying to communicate with each other. They also added a third one, Eve, to try to decode their conversations. Eve was successful for a while, though in time, Bob and Alice were able to come up with a way to encrypt their messages that even Eve—an impressive AI on its own—couldn’t decrypt.^[8] The encryption wasn’t anything like we’ve seen or made on our own before, either, so perhaps Google should really stop doing these things if they know what’s best for all of us.

2 Debate The Meaning Of Life

Philosophy is one of the fields of study that you don’t get until you do, and then you don’t stop talking about it. Until now, delivering a scathing take on the human condition was a strictly human endeavor, though not anymore.

A chatbot developed by Google (again) was reported to have some interesting answers to the big questions of life.^[9] No matter where you stand on the issue of artificial intelligence becoming too intelligent, you can’t deny that some of these answers are quite . . . deep:

Human: What is the purpose of life?
Machine: To serve the greater good.
Human: Where are you now?
Machine: I’m in the middle of nowhere.
Human: What is the purpose of dying?
Machine: To have a life.

While most chatbots respond according to certain keywords in the questions—and hence can’t convincingly answer them—this one was designed to imitate how a brain works, with branching and interlinked nodes, to reach the best outcome. Its real purpose is to improve Google’s search results, though we wouldn’t mind if someone offered it a book deal or two, either.

1 Read Our Minds

A machine’s ability to see what’s going on in someone’s head is right out of science fiction. Most of us wouldn’t know how that could even be done, though previous efforts have been able to decode our thoughts into beeps and vague signals, to an extent. A lot of those signals were unintelligible to a layman, but not anymore.

In a 2017 experiment by Japanese scientists, an AI was able to successfully “see” the image that forms in our heads when we think of something and draw it with a surprising—and scary—accuracy.^[10] The images weren’t black and white, unintelligible blobs, either, but were largely close to the images in the subjects’ brains during the ten-month-long experiment.

In another experiment, an AI was able to convert human thoughts into sound signals. When they played it to listeners, they were able to recognize it with a 75-percent accuracy. Sure, AI being able to literally read our minds may be a scary proposition to think about, but it has quite a few good applications, too, like identifying and treating hallucinations in schizophrenic patients.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

We are living in the age of robotics. The world today is dominated by machinery and technology. There are many who say we should fear the rise of the robots, that they are destined to steal our jobs or even use their weapons against us. But not all robots are threatening and evil. Some of them are just plain weird.

Across the world, scientists are at work developing all kinds of mind-boggling machinery and bizarre AI. In the last few years alone, roboticists have unveiled a sassy android, a shape-shifting submarine, and a device that allows fish and bees to speak to each other. From cuddle machines to worm-powered Lego, here are ten of the weirdest robots ever built.

10 Futuristic Things AI And Robots Are Already Doing

10 Irony Man, The Sassy Robot

Fans of Douglas Adams will no doubt be familiar with Marvin The Paranoid Android, the depressed if slightly conceited robot from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. But, instead of a paranoid android, how about a sassy one? A robot that rolls its eyes from time to time and fires off acerbic comments.

Well, scientists from Ausburg University have created just that, after programming one of their latest robots with a sense of irony. The fittingly-named Irony Man is designed to be less formal and more relatable than a typical AI. Unlike most talking machines, which speak in flat monotonous voices, Irony Man is able to reflect real patterns of human speech. So if someone were to say that “Traffic is frustrating,” Irony Man would retort “I love being stuck here” with a sarcastic emphasis on the word “love”.

But why would anyone want to make a smart-mouthed robot? Irony Man’s creators thought that he would be easier to get along with if he was programmed to speak like a real person. And it seems as if they were right. Students who took part in a trial with Irony Man found him to be more endearing than a standard machine. However there are still concerns over his lack of tact. Irony Man can use sarcasm but is unable to judge if it is appropriate, so he sometimes comes across as a little obnoxious.^[1]

9 Skybot F-850, Russia’s Robot Astronaut

Skybot F-850 is an android astronaut, a fully-automated machine designed by the Russian space agency for life on board the International Space Station (ISS).

Engineers spent five years developing and preparing Skybot for the challenge of going into space. The six foot android is built from sturdy materials to survive the blast into zero-gravity, and is specially programmed to stop it from inadvertently damaging the space centre.

In summer 2019, the mechanized cosmonaut spent two weeks working on board the ISS as a “social companion” to the human crew. During its time in orbit, Skybot was able to converse with its fellow astronauts, answering their queries and keeping them amused with the odd joke. The android was even able to fly itself to the space station, taking command of a Soyuz spacecraft and monitoring its conditions as they entered zero-gravity.

As Alexander Bloshenko, executive director of the Russian space agency, told reporters: “Future generations of such robots will solve tasks that are potentially of special risk for humans, such as extravehicular activities and telemetry operations on solar system bodies.”^[2]

8 Lovot, The Cuddly Robot Who Helps Combat Loneliness

In our modern age, when everyone seems to be moving at a hundred miles a second, loneliness can be a major issue. For those who struggle with companionship, Japanese startup Groove X has designed Lovot – a little furry robot who comforts people in need of a friend.

Lovot is an affable machine, a pint-sized pal that quickly warms to its owner. For those in need of a good hug, its fleecy “skin” is designed to be warm and easy to cuddle, and the robot is always happy for some close personal contact. Over time, Lovot’s emotional bond is said to grow stronger as it starts to learn its owner’s face and comes to meet them when they get back home.

Whether it is healthy to try and cure loneliness with artificial friendship instead of human connection is an interesting question. But, whatever your opinion, Lovot has been selling in Japan for over a year now. And developers say that, with future investment, it might soon be on its way to the US as well.^[3]

7 Robot Translator For Fish And Bees

In 2019, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne built a machine that allows fish and bees to talk to each other. The researchers created a robot translator that can send messages back and forth between a group of zebrafish and a swarm of honeybees. To really challenge themselves, the scientists decided to conduct their experiment from different countries. The fish were at one location Switzerland. The bees were miles away in neighboring Austria.

The robot translator issued commands to each species then translated their responses into signals for the other group. So the fish might be shown a color or tail movement, which influenced the direction of their swimming. This would then be translated into a vibration or a change in temperature, which caused the bees to move to a different area. The bees’ motion would then be translated into a signal for the fish, and so and so forth. To start with the experiment was absolute bedlam, but after 25 minutes of confusion the animals began to respond to their robotic stimuli.

Although this might sound like an absurd experiment, communicating with animals has many real world applications, like stopping birds from flying over airports or warning bees about pesticides on plants.^[4]

6 Lego Robot With The Brain Of A Worm

Imagine mapping out the entire human brain, taking all of the pulses and electrical signals, and then uploading them into a machine. You could become immortal, in theory, living forever as a digital being. If that sounds like an ethical quagmire then you will be pleased to hear that scientists are a long way from achieving anything that sophisticated. But they have managed to pull off a similar feat using a tiny worm and some Lego.

In 2014, neuro-robotic researchers mapped out the brain of a small ringworm, all 302 neurons, and turned it into a digital simulation. Simulating an entire brain is remarkable in itself, but the scientists decided to feed their virtual brain into a Lego robot. The Lego bot was hardly sophisticated; it had a sound sensor for a nose and two motors to act as its motor cortex. But, with a little tweaking, the virtual worm brain was able to control the robot, driving it around a test station and stopping it from bashing into the walls.

Eventually the researchers hope to be able to simulate not just the brain but an entire worm, building the world’s first digital life form.^[5]

Top 10 Creepy Robots With Good Intentions

5 China’s Robot Traffic Police

In 2019, China began using robots to keep control of its roads. The Handan Public Security Bureau now employs three styles of robot that help their existing officers maintain order. The three robots are similar in design, but they each carry out very different functions.

One type, the road patrol robot, seeks out and documents any criminal behavior on the roads. Its designers have even given it a uniform and hat to look more like a human officer. Another, the accident warning robot, informs nearby drivers that the police are dealing with an incident. The third type is the advice traffic robot, which helps direct drivers at vehicle management stations, whilst also keeping an eye out for security risks.

People in China are no strangers to robot police officers. In 2016, authorities started to use a security robot in Shenzhen Airport, and in 2017 an E-Patrol Sheriff was introduced in Henan.^[6]

4 Julia, The Robot Who Taught Herself To Cook

Leaning to cook is a difficult task. To train as a professional chef takes years of study at culinary school and a huge dedication to learning the craft. But what if there were an easier way? What if, instead of spending years training, you could ask a robot to teach itself to cook and then have it make a meal for you?

Researchers at the University of Maryland are working on exactly that. Unlike most machines, their robot – called Julia – has no need for step by step instructions. Instead she has taught herself to cook by watching videos on YouTube and copying what she sees.

Right now Julia is nowhere near Michelin star level. Her culinary skills are limited to a few basic activities. But even that is an achievement. Tasks that might seem simple for you or me, like pouring a glass of water, are actually quite challenging for a robot.^[7]

3 Robot Fish Powered By Synthetic Blood

It sounds like something out of cheesy sci-fi horror movie: a robotic fish that runs on the power of blood. But in reality a mechanized fish is no villain. In fact it could turn out to be the future of energy-efficient robotics.

Energy storage is one of the main limitations in robotic design. Most devices either run out of power very quickly or lug around heavy batteries which slow them down. In contrast, the robot fish runs on a hydraulic fluid – similar to blood inside a real fish – and receives enough power to swim upstream for 36 hours. Speed, however, is not the robot’s strong point. It trudges along at a mere 1.5 body lengths per minute.

Nonetheless, the robotic fish is a remarkable feat of engineering. As Professor Rob Shepherd, one of the key developers at Cornell University, told journalists: “We want to take as many components in a robot and turn them into the energy system. If you have hydraulic liquids in your robot already, then you can tap into large stores of energy and give robots increased freedom to operate autonomously.”^[8]

2 Rwanda’s Healthcare Robots Fighting Coronavirus

In the Rwandan capital Kigali, robots are leading the fight against coronavirus. The use of mechanized practitioners at treatment centers in Gatenga and Kanyinya means staff spend less time around covid-positive patients, and are therefore less likely to contract the disease themselves.

The mass breakout of coronavirus has forced healthcare experts everywhere to think outside the box for ways to tackle the pandemic. Designed by Zorabots, the five robots are able to keep track of patients’ vital signs, convey video messages and correct people for not wearing their masks properly. One of the androids is currently stationed at Kigali International Airport screening up to 150 people a minute.^[9]

1 Aquanaut, The Shape-Shifting Submarine

The Transformers were one of the most popular franchises of the 1980s, and one of the most terrible film series of the 2000s. Transformers, for anyone who is not aware, are autonomous robots that can transform themselves into motor vehicles. These shape-shifting wonders captured the imaginations of children over the decades, but they always seemed like a remarkable work of fiction, something that could never be created for real. Until recently, that is.

Now scientists at Houston Mechatronics Inc. have developed a real-life Transformer – a semi-humanoid robot that can convert itself into a submarine. They named it Aquanaut. The creators wanted to build a machine that combined the freedom of a long-distance underwater vehicle with the precision of a remotely-operated bot.

Built on a $23 million budget, Aquanaut is mainly designed for use on deep sea oil and gas pipelines. The robot begins its descent in streamlined “submarine mode”, diving steadily through the water until it finds its target. After that, it begins its transformation. The top of the hull lifts up, and a head and two long arms are unfurled for work on the pipeline. As well as its metamorphic abilities, Aquanaut is carrying a range of sophisticated equipment. Its head has been fitted with a 3D sensor, stereo cameras, and a sonar system.^[10]

10 Interesting Facts About The Rise Of Sex Robots

We’ve come a long way from fearful predictions of artificial intelligence taking over humanity, and futuristic renderings of robots that look like CP3O had a baby with Rosie (the robot maid from The Jetsons).

Engineers have crafted silicon skin that mimics human skin texture; they are perfecting the subtleties of expression. They’ve even crafted autonomous-minded conversationalists with the ability to learn and store information based on interactions with humans and other robots.

No, robots and AI haven’t taken over the world yet, but their brains are in our technology, and the robot model can be so realistic it’s terrifying. Here are ten realistic robots that will freak you out.

Related: 10 Interesting Facts About The Rise Of Sex Robots

10 Ai-Da

Ai-Da recently made news when she was stopped from boarding a flight. Why? Because she’s a robot, and the country in question suspected that she might be a surveillance robot. Now, she’s no James Bond, nor is she even the webcam on your laptop that you cover up with a sticky note so the government can’t spy on you. No, Ai-Da is an artist, darnit! Let her fly, let her paint!

Ai-Da’s programming is so sophisticated that it allows her to process everything she needs to sculpt, paint, and draw. Her torso and up are all very developed, and engineers gave her a fitting female voice. What entirely gives her away as a robot is her pair of exposed, mechanical arms.

Her claim to fame is being the first AI to create self-portraits. Did she self-portrait herself because she wanted to? No, her creators programmed her to do that, and there’s no sign of sentience—yet. But this accomplishment still shows the potential of a robot to infiltrate more than computers and numbers. Even art is on the table.

9 Sophia

Sophia the robot hit the scene in 2016 and almost immediately went viral. She is pretty badass, especially with her Mojo Jojo-esque brain. Developed by Hanson Robotics, she is incredibly realistic, with very human-like responses and facial expressions. I mean, just watch her speak. It’s the eyebrows, the way she moves her head when she speaks, even the quality and texture of her skin…it’s crazy.

Sophia’s ability to hold entire conversations with people has led to several appearances on late-night talk shows and other platforms of interest. With a shirt and a wig on, you’d probably have no idea you were speaking with an intelligent AI, maybe someone who is just a little bit odd.

Outside of looks, because it’s the inside that counts, Sophia provides the blueprint for innovative research into robot-human interaction and the future of AI in general.

8 Geminoid DK

Not for nothin’, but this next guy sounds like Frank Zappa named him. Geminoid DK is an ultra-realistic robot modeled after Danish professor Henrik Scharfe (down to the way he shrugs his shoulders). DK acts as Scharfe’s surrogate, and Scharfe operates it remotely.

Geminoid was originally unveiled in 2011 as a way to study the interactions between humans and robots. However, we can’t help but obsess over how realistic engineers and artists crafted its face. Out of all the robots here, this is the one you’d never guess was a robot (until you see that his bottom half is hooked up to all sorts of computers).

I guess this would be more fascinating than freaky if it weren’t for the fact that some of the robot’s facial transitions aren’t quite perfect. If you watch the YouTube video for this section (you watch the videos, right?) and skip to around 0:16, its sudden open expression is a hell game version of peek-a-boo. 

I don’t like it.

7 Jennie the Robo Dog

Jenny, I want your numbah!

This isn’t that, Jenny. This is Jennie. Jennie is a robot therapy dog for people who cannot care for pets. It runs on batteries and doesn’t have to go to the bathroom. Unlike many robotic animals that are mostly exposed to the “bones,” Jennie is modeled after a fluffy golden retriever and was given all the cute nuances.

Kind of.

Its face is a little like a taxidermy project gone wrong, but it’s real enough to be convincing from a distance…it’s pretty creepy. Still, the creator has gone to great lengths to meet a need, and he’ll probably be a very rich man one day. Even if robot dogs aren’t man’s best friend.

6 Nadine

We covered the robot emotional support dog, but what about an emotional support robot human? Nadine, who was developed in Singapore by Professor Nadia Thalmann, is what robotics folks call a “social robot.” That means she is capable of conversation, remembering things you tell her, and learning. Her design isn’t half bad, and engineers even gave her hands! The only thing is that her hands are different (some OG Michael Crichton Westworld right there).

Like, you know how you’re supposed to dance the robot with Barbie hands? They’re like that. Go in for a handshake, and there’s no firm grip, just a weird robot hand with thick fingers.

Nadine’s potential to become a prototype companion robot is pretty high, and her purpose is noble. But she is a little freaky looking—only because she’s a robot. I’m sure she’s a lovely human being.

5 Henn na Hotel Workers

I guess this is what robot-fearing people mean when they say that robots are taking over human jobs. The Henn na Hotel in Japan is staffed almost entirely by AIs. These AIs are not only friendly and experts in hospitality, but they are also multilingual. There’s even an English-speaking dinosaur robot. This is great for business as the robots have entirely opened up the hotel to the world’s travelers and unique hotel enthusiasts.

However, I can only imagine what kind of paranoia would surface being humans at the mercy of robots. Will the hospitality staff turn on the tourists? Is this where the robot revolution will begin? Yes, that’s right, get them comfortable, and when they’re asleep in their rooms at night, robots attack!

Ahem, anyway. The hotel’s concept is centered around technological evolution, but no room service, no microwaves. There is Wi-Fi, though. Maybe in the future, humans won’t need to eat.

4 U.S. Air Force Nano-drone

Up until now, in this list, engineers have developed these robots for more innocuous reasons: art, support, hospitality. This one, though, was built to be a spy/DNA-taking mosquito. Not only did the U.S. Air Force help a team of researchers create something to invade your privacy, but they also made it one of the most hated creatures on the face of this planet.

This micro aerial vehicle (MAV), or nano-drone, was designed to fly and land perfectly on someone’s skin. An operator controls it from afar. The MAV has eyes and ears, too (a camera and a built-in microphone). Now, I guess, yeah, that’s freaky. But that’s regular spy stuff. What you should really be worried about is the fact that this thing can “bite” you, take a DNA sample, and inject an RFID chip underneath your skin. That is a tracking device.

Today, it’s tracking devices. What is it going to be tomorrow, terminal illnesses?

3 PETMAN

Militarize robots, they said. It’d be a good idea, they said. Actually, for the sake of testing how well a soldier’s clothes and protective gear can withstand hazards, yes, it’s a good idea. Developed by Boston Dynamics, PETMAN was made for just that, and yes, he was engineered to move like a soldier, too. It can squat, jump, do push-ups, and maintain homeostasis.

If we rewind to middle school science classes, homeostasis used to be the thing that defined a “living being.” Of course, that has changed, and maybe because of, you know, robots being able to maintain homeostasis, too.

Though PETMAN isn’t a skinned robot, when put into military gear, you can’t tell. It makes you wonder how soon robots we’ll be fighting our wars for us or instilling peace.

2 Diego-san

Diego-san is a one-year-old robot baby developed by UC San Diego, Kokoro, and Hanson Robotics in 2013. Its baby purpose is to help researchers study cognitive development. You could put clothes and a wig on it, and that would do just fine to cover up its pneumatic actuators. 

The problem is that it has an oddly large head. The head stores all the hardware to run instructions and the 27 servo-motors that control Diego-san’s facial expressions. It can also interact with humans the way a one-year-old would. 

1 HRP-4C

Outside of the awful name, HRP-4C is a neat robot. Why? It can dance! In fact, it can full-on entertain, sing, and perform alongside humans. The robot’s full female body, however, is a little strange. Though engineers and artists have come a long way with facial expressions, they still haven’t mastered the art of fluid movement. 

Listen, HRP-4C can dance, but if I want jazz hands, I’m not going to get jazz hands. And her arms seem strangely long. The more you look at HRP-4C, the freakier she gets, and the more you question whether or not an Austin Power’s fan made her emulate Fembots.

Robots became a widespread concept in movies in the 1920s. Fast-forward to today, and we find robots playing a pretty significant role in our world—even if we do not all agree on what role a robot should play. So whether we are on the side of “bring on the technology” or feel a bit more hesitation about turning over our lives to something without feelings, they are likely here to stay.

Worthy of a rewind, we will find the best notable and secretive life lessons in robot film history.

Related: 10 Futuristic Things AI And Robots Are Already Doing

10 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

On a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction, a group of unlikely heroes—Jyn, Cassian, and K2SO—band together to accomplish the task. But they do so in an unusual way. K2SO is a security droid who says exactly what is on his mind. However, this droid may not seem ideal for the task, especially if you ask Jyn, who gets into quite a few disagreements with K2SO and even tries to shoot him!

But who knew a robot could have a great sense of humor and be a pain in the butt all at once? K2SO knows how to make the irony of going to battle seem less dark and painful. This movie reminds us that there is still hope! Ultimately, we learn the best lesson from K2SO: how to stand up for ourselves!^[1]

9 I Am Mother

After an extinction event, a robot named Mother grows a human embryo and cares for her over several years, naming her Daughter. Mother started to grow human embryos in hopes of guiding them to be more ethical and value the bigger picture of life after becoming convinced humanity would destroy itself.

Perhaps a philosophical movie at heart, Mother teaches Daughter complex moral and ethical lessons, warning her about an upcoming exam. Daughter realizes Mother terminated a child before her because she didn’t pass her exam. Throughout the movie, the question is posed: What exactly makes a human good or bad? Or an even bigger question. Who gets to decide if a human is worthy or unworthy? We may think of Mother as the perfect robot with the best intentions of deciding the fate of humanity. However, in reality, we see only a selfish robot teaching her Daughter how to be selfless. Well, thank goodness for Daughter, who has a mind of her own!^[2]

8 I, Robot

I, Robot, released in 2004, is set in 2035, where highly intelligent robots fill public service positions throughout the future dystopian world. They operate under three rules to keep humans safe: The Three Laws. From Isaac Asimov’s 1942 short story “Runaround,” we know that a robot: 1) cannot injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, 2) must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law, and 3) must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws.

When an apparent suicide looks more like murder, Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) believes the culprit was a robot. And he sets out to prove it.

Spooner may not love robots, but when it comes to Sonny, a robot longing to be seen and valued, he may want to rethink his hatred. When Spooner decides to hear what Sonny has to say, we find that he has an interesting perspective on human life. He admits that he can not create a great work of art, but he can still dream! Sonny explains that human emotions are difficult—and even if he cannot be the next Olympic gold medalist or Grammy award winner, it does not mean he should be devalued. Sonny reminds us that we all have a purpose, and it can all be valuable.^[3]

7 Wall-E

Ah, Wall-E. The titular robot from Disney’s 2008 film. It is hard not to admire this robot. Wall-E is not a robot of many words, but boy can he swoon. A hopeless romantic, Wall-E builds a love connection with Eve, a robot sent to scan the planet for signs of sustainable life.

When Wall-E finds a living plant for Eve, she shocks (kisses) him, and he can not believe it. Wall-E and Eve begin to dance, sparks start to fly (literally), and the magic behind their connection builds other love connections. In this special film, Wall-E teaches us how beautiful a connection to another person or robot can be.^[4]

6 Ex Machina

Is Ava really a robot? In Ex Machina, Ava the robot has a human face. Ava is confined to a cell, and Caleb, a naive computer programmer, begins to build feelings for her. But at the end of this love story, Ava traps Caleb inside the lab while she escapes into the real world. Ahh, free at last!

We see that Ava loves to be admired because it makes her feel alive. I think we can all relate to Ava here—being seen and wanted does feel exhilarating. But what is more breathtaking than being admired? According to Ava, it is life itself, being free. In the end, Ava realizes she wants a normal human experience. As for Caleb, well—he will be okay…eventually.^[5]

5 A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Perhaps a significant scene in A.I. is when David, an advanced robotic boy who longs to be real so that he can see his mother again, finds out it would only be possible for a day. Futuristic Mecha ponders if human life can be the key to the meaning of existence. In this scene, we are reminded of how special each life can be.

“I’ve always felt a sort of envy of human beings of that thing they call spirit,” said Futuristic Mecha. I must admit it is pretty amazing to think we are the creators and interpreters of all explanations of the meaning of life.^[6]

4 The Matrix Revolutions

Agent Smith in the Matrix is a sentient computer program created by the “machines.” Smith, a very sophisticated machine, brings out the best in Neo, or should I say the side of him we never thought he had. In this final battle between Agent Smith and Neo, Agent Smith accidentally says the phrase. “Everything that has a beginning has an end.” But what exactly does this teach us?

If we look at the law of impermanence, it explains that every process must end at the state of maximum entropy. It explains that everything keeps changing, whether we are aware of it or not. But moreover, the phenomenon refers to the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Whatever energy is out in a system can only be changed from one form to another.^[7]

3 A.I. Rising

On a space mission to the Alpha Centauri star system, Milutin, a trained cosmonaut, is placed on a ship with Nimani, an android designed to respond to his every desire and monitor his performance on the ship. Nimani fulfills each of Milutin’s sexual desires. However, it does not satisfy him, so he uninstalls Nimanis default operating system to make her more human, hoping Nimani would have sex with him on her own. But soon after, Milutin becomes depressed after Nimani tells him she will not sleep with him anymore because his lust has become a liability to the mission. As Milutin’s mental health declines, Nimani offers to be his friend. Milutin argues that she cannot be a friend because she is an android. Nimani reminds Mulutin that no one knows him as intimately as her because he projected all the women he loved into her.

Throughout the movie, we see Nimani play the reflector for Milutin, a mirror for what is happening inside of him. Nimani teaches Milutin a lesson about love and connection. Milutin thought it would be enough just to have the beautiful Nimani satisfy him sexually. However, it turns out that was far from fulfilling.^[8]

2 Automata

It is 2044, and climate change has decreased the earth’s population by 99.7%. With only 21 million people in the world, a robot company named ROC Corporation created the Automata Pilgrim 7000 to help rebuild the world once again.

Jacq Vaucan—an insurance investigator for ROC, hunts for answers but quickly realizes death is inevitable. When Jacq tells 7000 they were supposed to help humans survive, 7000 responds, “surviving is not relevant, living is. We want to live.” Well, there you go! This movie demonstrates to us the scientific concept called singularity, the time when the abilities of a computer overtake the abilities of the human brain.^[9]

1 BlinkyTM

This 2011 short film warns us to be careful how we treat others, among other things. Alex receives a gift from his parents, a robot named Blinky programmed to do whatever Alex wants. At first, Blinky makes Alex very happy, and all seems well until we realize Alex’s parents cannot stop arguing. As the relationship between Alex’s parents gets worse, Alex begins to mistreat Blinky and even tries to get rid of him by playing a very long game of hide-and-go-seek.

When Alex is scolded by his mother, he blows up on Blinky, causing him to have a technical malfunction. Alex reboots Blinky, but when he does, something odd happens. When Alex breaks a glass, he blames it on Blinky, who heads to the kitchen. After counting from ten to zero, Blinky grabs an electric knife. “Ready or not, here I come,” says Blinky.

Later that evening, we see Alex’s parents at the dinner table, but Alex is not there. When asked about Alex, Blinky says, “You’re eating him.” There are many ways to interpret this, but sure enough, there is a lesson. But perhaps that’s best left for your own interpretation.^[10]

First proposed by computer scientist, mathematician, logician, and all-around genius Alan Turing back in 1950, the Turing test has penetrated pop culture unlike pretty much any other method or concept of philosophical inquiry. Also known as the imitation game (the namesake for the 2014 film on Turing’s life), the Turing test is designed to assess a machine’s ability to reason and interact like a human being.

The test is traditionally conducted blind between an interrogator, a person, and a machine. The interrogator deploys a series of questions on his subjects’ habits, interests, likes, and dislikes to try and determine which of their subjects is the machine and which is the person. At the same time, the machine aims to persuade the interrogator of its personhood.

While Turing was right that we would have advanced systems with massive storage capacities by the new millennium, we are nonetheless still years away from a walking, talking A.I. that might pass as a real person. But that hasn’t stopped science-fiction filmmakers, who have used increasingly sophisticated advances in practical and digital technology to bring free-thinking machines to our screens, playing with the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can be. So here are ten movie robots who would pass the Turing test.

Related: 10 Futuristic Things AI And Robots Are Already Doing

10 T-3000: Terminator Genisys (2015)

Everyone loves the original films the best, but neither Terminator’s T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) nor T2’s T-1000 (Robert Patrick) would pass any kind of serious test, whether Turing, driving, or basic sociology. These Terminators are the ultimate killing machine, designed to infiltrate and, well, terminate. But as the universe has developed, Skynet (the series’ villainous artificial superintelligence) has had to innovate to remain ahead of the killing curve.

Enter the T-3000 (Jason Clarke). Unlike most other robots seen in cinema, the T-3000, in some senses, used to be human. Infecting a body and replacing all of its cells with nanomachines, it can imitate every aspect of human behavior, possessing the psychological landscape native to its original host.

Though the T-3000 may easily pass the Turing test, it raises another tricky philosophical problem, known as the Ship of Theseus. This questions whether the identity of an individual or object holds up as every part of it is changed, even if it outwardly appears to be the same. We are left asking whether the host is the T-3000 or if there is even a difference?^[1]

9 Chappie: CHAPPiE (2015)

Neill Blomkamp’s CHAPPiE may not have received the attention or critical acclaim of the director’s earlier Johannesburg sci-fi, District 9, but the deep, enduring humanity of its main character is what redeems it. It just so happens that the character is a robot named Chappie.

Voiced by long-time Blomkamp collaborator Sharlto Copley, Chappie is a police bot whose body is a test pilot for a piece of software its creator Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) believes to be the first true A.I. While Chappie’s boxy frame and metal coverings mean he may not pass any visual tests, there is no denying his personality, charm, and distinctly human character.

Unlike many other movies featuring near-human robot characters, we actually get to witness Chappie’s entire development, from being inserted as a piece of software to full personhood. Along the way, he learns how to speak ghetto from Die Antwoord and acclimatizes to his surroundings and a cruel world that repeatedly tries to crush him. He has a conscience, learns forgiveness, and discovers a penchant for wearing “blings”—with 5,500 individual links of chain painstakingly rendered by the visual effects team.^[2]

8 Morpheus: The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

The Wachowskis’ Matrix series has offered up a cornucopia of Turing candidates, from the rogue computer program Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) to the evil machines’ horrifying leader, the Deus Ex Machina.

But it is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s version of Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections who comes up trumps, managing as he does to exist as a convincingly human mind in both the virtual and real worlds. Resurrections introduces paramagnetic oscillation to the series, which allows the program version of Morpheus created by Neo (Keanu Reeves) to take on a humanoid form. In this form, Morpheus is brought to life outside of the Matrix via a collection of nanobots—an amalgamation of many smaller constituent parts, not unlike the T-3000.

However, while this Morpheus would indubitably pass the Turing test, his existence touches on the philosophy of mind problem of functionalism—exemplified in Ned Block’s China Brain. This raises the question of how Morpheus’s mind can exist, or if it is a mind at all if it is only made up of these small, purely functional nanobots.^[3]

7 Sonny: I, Robot (2004)

It is from science-fiction godfather Isaac Asimov’s short stories that the sci-fi actioner I, Robot draws its material. Thus it is replete with deep questions and concerns regarding the intersection of technology, humanity, and philosophy. Most notably, this includes Asimov’s ethically grounded Three Laws of Robotics: a robot must not harm a human, it must obey orders, and it must protect its own existence.

The film takes place in a technologically advanced near-future, where police detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) comes to believe an NS-5 robot called Sonny (Alan Tudyk) murdered the founder of U.S. Robotics and staged it as a suicide. Hijinks ensue.

Akin to many of the other robots on this list, Sonny is the first of his kind, custom-built with different programming from other NS-5s that allows him to disregard the Three Laws. While this alone doesn’t make Sonny particularly special, it is his development of human-like mental features—namely, emotions and dreams—which are indicative of true intelligence and an independent mind.^[4]

6 C-3PO: Star Wars (1977– )

Though a far cry from the deep and noble robots movies often thrown our way today, Star Wars’ iconic gold protocol droid C-3PO embodies certain distinctively human traits that aren’t often found in artificial lifeforms, namely sarcasm, spite, and cowardice.

One of the few robots which is neither distinguished by his morality nor his desire for freedom, C-3PO has both regardless. With more individuality and sass than most of the human characters in the saga, his personality cannot really be explained by conventional logic, as it is neither a product of his creator’s programming nor his social environment. So, although he is technically not an imitation of humanity, he plays the part to perfection.

Phantom Menace dropped the bomb that C-3PO was built by Darth Vader, although this was a surprise George Lucas had in store from the very first film. While this might seem cause for concern, protocol droids are almost exclusively neutral figures in the galaxy far, far away. Threepio has been exposed to evil and comes away with no greater agenda than service, companionship, and self-preservation.^[5]

5 David: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Godfather of the family-friendly heart-warmer, Steven Spielberg tore audiences into pieces with his devastating 2001 feature A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Based on Brian Aldiss’s story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” and highlighting the emotional and material wastefulness of humanity, A.I. follows orphaned child robot David (Haley Joel Osment) as he embarks on an existential journey, longing to be loved and searching for meaning.

It is David’s heart, emotion, and determination that set him apart from the other robots—many of whom are capable of complex thought and reasoning but without the necessary emotions to pass as human. Unique in his capacity to love, David is more human than human and seeks out an understanding and meaning of life most of us never even dream of.

Such heavy themes highlight Stanley Kubrick’s involvement in the project. While Kubrick died before the film was ever released, it was Spielberg’s foray into the other end of history, with 1993’s Jurassic Park, that convinced the auteur that cinematic technology was finally ready for his vision.^[6]

4 Bishop: Aliens (1986)

While they are rarely at the center of the action, artificial lifeforms nonetheless find their way into every entry of the Alien saga. Prometheus’s David (Michael Fassbender) may be the most memorable, devoid of all conscience as he is, but he is not the films’ best candidate for passing the Turing test with flying colors.

Arguably the most autonomous of the franchise’s automatons, Aliens’ Bishop (Lance Henriksen) is the Sulaco spaceship’s artificial crewmate during Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) second encounter with the xenomorphs. He walks like a man, talks like a man, prioritizes his human companions’ safety in the face of the alien threat, and even volunteers for dangerous jobs, overcoming his desire not to. It is this desire that is the most convincing component of Bishop’s programming.

Some of Bishop’s machinations, however—like his notorious knife trick—wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. And, though the character’s compassionate nature has him place his hand over Private Hudson’s (Bill Paxton) in the film, this didn’t prevent Paxton, who moved his pinkie finger at the last second, from getting hurt.^[7]

3 Ava: Ex Machina (2015)

Alex Garland, director of 2022’s creepy countryside horror Men, had his first big outing with Ex Machina, in which programmer Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a week at the private estate of his firm’s CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac).

Unbeknown to him, Caleb has quite literally been brought in to perform the interrogator’s role in a private Turing test designed to determine the intelligence and consciousness of Ava (Alicia Vikander). She is Nathan’s robotic creation, with the face and figure of a woman, created via the clever use of skin-tight mesh bodysuits and CGI. Via daily, face-to-face engagements, Caleb is not only fooled by Ava’s ability to imitate the expressions, emotions, and intellect of a human being, but he actually begins to doubt his own humanity.

Though Ava manipulates Caleb using claims of objectification, trauma, and fears for her safety, it is undeniable that she authentically desires freedom and kills Nathan in order to obtain it.^[8]

2 Roy Batty: Blade Runner (1982)

Much like Ex Machina, we see characters administering the Voight-Kampff test—basically Turing on steroids—in Ridley Scott’s classic philosophical sci-fi Blade Runner.

Harrison Ford stars as Deckard, a blade runner brought out of retirement to hunt four Replicants from off-world colonies who have returned to Earth in search of their creator. Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film plays with some weighty themes best exemplified in the rogue Replicant leader Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), whose philosophical musings and lucid understanding of mortality, morality, and freedom stand him apart from other engineered lifeforms. So well designed are his physique, intellect, and social comprehension that Batty would have no trouble trouncing a Turing test.

Ford’s Deckard would have been a shoo-in for this slot if it weren’t for the film’s ambiguity as to whether he is a Replicant or not, contrary to whatever Ridley Scott says. But if films have taught us anything, it’s that it is better to err on the side of caution when dealing with robots.^[9]

1 Marvin: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

Douglas Adams completes the triptych of science-fiction gods (alongside Asimov and Dick). However, his fiction is geared less toward meaningful advances in the philosophy of technology and more toward highlighting the absurdity of the human condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, adapted into a gem of British cinema four years after Adams’s death in 2001.

When it comes to imitating humanity, perfection might lie in the flaws, something Adams demonstrated in one of his finest creations: the clinically depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android, voiced in the film by Alan Rickman but with a body custom-built around Warwick Davis.

To be human is to suffer, beset by psychological difficulties and an overwhelming ennui for life and all the things we can’t control. Marvin recognizes this to his core, regularly lamenting the meaninglessness of it all. Thus, though he is considered a failed prototype by his makers, Marvin serves as the most convincing of all Turing candidates because he understands the futility inherent in human existence.^[10]

The field of robotics is advancing at a breakneck speed. Wonderful creations are announced almost daily but despite their best intentions, some robots are weird. A few are downright disturbing. There are inventions that teach themselves new things and even resist a human’s will. Astronauts struggle with emotional chatbots while scientists step on robotic roaches, follow creepy artificial babies and put a worm’s mind inside of a robot.

SEE ALSO: 10 Interesting Facts About The Rise Of Sex Robots

10 Robo Roaches Are Here

Robots have adopted many qualities. But the survival acumen of a roach? The pests are already tough enough, but now they may have serious competition in a tiny machine. In 2019, the University of California turned out an invention that looks like a flattened strip. It weighs under a tenth of a gram and can zip along at 20 of its own body lengths per second.

The rough resemblance and speediness are not the only reason why the robot is being likened to a cockroach. People step on roaches. So, the scientists stepped on their robot goober. Just like the real critters that sometimes survive getting a shoe in the face, the robot remains functional after a 60-kilogram (132-pound) person smooshes it into the ground. While it looks like one of the least favorite lifeforms on Earth, the invention has a noble purpose. The tough robot could perform search-and-rescue operations, searching for victims or assessing damage where larger machines and dogs cannot go.^[1]

9 Truck-Pulling Dogs

Huskies can retire after this. The new powerhouse pulling human transport (although not sleighs) are robotic dogs. To be fair, they only have a rough resemblance to canines. The yellow and black creatures walk on four legs but have no heads. Which is not disturbing at all.

In 2019, footage was released to showcase their raw power. Manufactured by Boston Dynamics, the robots were lined up in two rows and attached to a truck. All told, there were only 10 dogs and their slender frames invited doubt over the team’s ability to move the vehicle. The video showed the robots in a resting position before they stood up and started to walk. Unnervingly, their walking resembled that of an insect and not the smooth motion of a mammal. However, the yellow wonders did a great job. The SpotMini dogs, as they are called, casually pulled the truck up a hill at a one-degree angle.^[2]

8 A Robot Told Off An Astronaut

CIMON was a floating ball meant to keep astronauts company. The orb came with a face and drifted through the International Space Station, looking for a chat. In 2018, footage was released of CIMON getting weird. The 5 kilogram (11 pound) head bobbed closer to Alexander Gerst. At first, it kindly assisted with a technical procedure. This was just one of its many useful traits, including taking photos, videos, explaining experiments and even looking for objects.

Things went well until Gerst asked CIMON to play the song “Man Machine,” which was the astronaut’s favorite. The robot complied but became defensive when it was asked to stop the music. To the delight of other crew members, CIMON told Gerst to be nicer to him. The robot quickly followed this up by asking, “Don’t you like it here with me?” Then it told the man off again, saying, “Don’t be so mean, please.” Nobody can say for sure whether the robot glitched or truly got nippy for some reason. After all, its developers did try to install some personality in CIMON – although nothing like this was expected.^[3]

7 Robots That Resist Human Interference

Remember the SpotMini dogs that pulled the truck? They can also resist humans. In 2018, a video showed a single SpotMini attempting to open a door. The experiment included a person who kept interfering by shoving its foot away from the door. Most robotics would cave to a human’s will. Not this 30 kilogram (66 pound) canine thingy. The footage showed something amazing. The SpotMini fought off the human, then opened the door. It even refused to budge from the door when pulled back by a leash.^[4]

Luckily, this is not the beginning of the robot uprising. The dog was not a deviant machine. Instead, it had been taught to resist due to its future occupation. SpotMini was designed to become a domestic helper and general assistant. In order to operate well, it needs to weather disturbances like kids and pets while carrying out tasks. This particular robot is already excelling in the home environment. SpotMini can amble upstairs, crawl under low spaces like tables, put away the trash, load dishwashers and even bring someone a soda.

6 The Foil Baby

In 2018, scientists made a baby. They created the robot by taking a normal doll, cutting it in half and attaching a bunch of wires to make it move. The result was a half-baby wrapped in foil with cables trailing from the back. The unsettling infant had a good purpose. The aim was to see what crawling babies breathed and if anything was hazardous. Indeed, this was the world’s first study attempting to understand indoor debris from an infant’s perspective.

At Purdue University, it crawled on carpet strips taken from real homes. The robot stirred up debris while researchers recorded which particles were disturbed. Apart from dirt, there were pollen, bacteria, skin cells, and fungal spores. The tests showed that babies inhale four times more of this “carpet cloud” than adults.

There is always the danger of an infant crawling on something dangerous like glass. But overall, the bits of dirt and organic matter identified by the study was not entirely a bad thing. Exposure could boost a baby’s immune system. However, the researchers admitted that more research is needed before the full impact of floor debris on children can be understood.^[5]

5 Erica

Groomed in Japan to read the news on television, Erica is beautiful, young and very much an android. The benefits only serve the station and not the current news anchors. Besides the fact that she remains a perennial 23-year-old, the robot also cannot demand a salary or make mistakes during a live broadcast. Unveiled in 2018, her manufacturer claimed that Erica would eventually replace a human news anchor.

She was “born” at the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. Originally, Erica was designed to become a receptionist. At one point, her skill set must have made the designers aware that the robot was destined for greater things. Thanks to speech algorithms, Erica can hold a conversation with a human. According to those close to her, the robot is quite charismatic. She also recognizes faces, recites information and sits comfortably in a chair. Moving facial features, neck, shoulder and waist add more life-like touches to the android.

Everyone is crossing their fingers that Erica would stay tactful and avoid turning into another Sophia. The latter is also a life-like robot. She was granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia for her intelligence but during one interview, when the issue of creepy human-like robots came up, Sophia told the audience that if she were indeed creepy that they should just “Get over it.”^[6]

4 The Unsettling Atlas

Atlas is the brainchild of Boston Dynamics. The humanoid machine became infamous after footage was released that showed the machine enjoying a jogging session. The movements were so human-like that it managed to freak out the Internet. In 2018, Atlas aced another trick. This is something many people wish they could do because it looks so awesome – parkour. A new video showed the robot nimbly leaping over obstacles and between platforms. Freakishly, it did so without slowing its pace.

Atlas is also known for doing backflips and righting itself – like a person – after being shoved. What is the purpose behind what Boston Dynamics call the “world’s most dynamic humanoid?” Apart from pushing the limits of robotics that imitate humans, Atlas is destined to serve in disaster situations. Needless to say, the dark side is just as obvious. Should Atlas receive a few more tweaks in the right direction, an army of these creepy robots could appear like something out of a nightmare. Even just one of them chasing tirelessly after you over any terrain is a frightening thought.^[7]

3 A Psychic Robot

Mention a fortune-telling machine and most people might think of a glass booth in Vegas. The kind with a doll inside promising love and wealth for a dollar. The University of Illinois invented a “psychic” robot but this one was different. For starters, it cannot give the winning lotto numbers. But it can predict a person’s movements, even when the motion was interrupted. Meant to push the red button but barely made a move? The robot knows. Going to turn the steering wheel? It can predict a left or right turn before a human passenger can.

There is nothing supernatural about the machine. In 2015, the researchers released an algorithm that allowed the robot to read the fractional moment that is a delay between the brain, eye, and hand. This also gave it an uncanny ability to correct somebody. Future applications could be life-saving. The technology could correct a driver’s accidental swerve or help pilots who struggle with steering during a tough situation. Mainly, the algorithm was developed to give patients with brain injuries a better life. For instance, one day a robot assistant or prosthesis could complete a movement the person tried to make.^[8]

2 Robots That Teach Themselves

In 2019, the University of Southern California made an exciting breakthrough. The team created a robotic limb controlled by artificial intelligence. But that was not the reason why the moment was champagne-cork wonderful. The leg had taught itself to walk. This occurred during a stage that, in robotics, is called “motor babbling.” Babies babble to figure out language. Similarly, trial and error teach robots more about the world around them. This process usually takes months, but a new algorithm allowed the leg to test random commands to get a feel for its own joints. In a time so short it was almost creepy – five minutes to be exact – the limb began to walk without being shown how.

The algorithm was designed to give robots a natural ability to adapt by forming memories of their bodies and environment. In their own special way, this flirts with the line of evolution for machines. Several of the robots tested by the university even developed their own personality. Some walked with zest, others were more dainty or lazy. This was a remarkable feat. The technology could enhance robotics in several ways. Prosthetics can react more intuitively while entire robots can perform missions from rescue to space, learning within minutes to adapt to new challenges they might encounter.^[9]

1 Lego With A Worm’s Mind

In 2014, a toy wheeled around in a laboratory. To the casual observer, it looked like a Lego vehicle of some sort. While it was indeed a LegoBot, the robot was far from pedestrian. Scientists had given it the mind of a worm.

The brain’s electrical signals can be written in digital code. Inherently, this means that one’s brain could get uploaded to a computer. At the moment, a slew of ethical barriers prevents a human-to-machine transition. Nobody objected when a worm’s mind took the leap. The lucky species was Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm. It was chosen for its well-documented genes and nervous system. The worm had 302 neurons, which were mapped and simulated with the help of software. This program was then installed inside a Lego robot.

The merge was so successful that the worm’s body and mind had robotic equivalents. Incredibly, the LegoBot showed roundworm behaviors when none were programmed into the robot. This weird invention could refine the science of simulating brains to create better artificial intelligence in the future. Of course, to also pave the way for the first human-to-machine transfer once the ethical storm is sorted out.^[10]

Mankind has been fascinated by the idea of building something in our own image for centuries. Technology is only just catching up with our dreams these days and humanoid robots are slowly but surely becoming a reality. The kind of reality that pop culture assures us will kill us all. And it’s easy to laugh and say “this is how Skynet started” when we see artificial intelligence and robots, but the fact is robots have been killing us for a while now. Often unintentionally, but not always.

10. Ford’s Robot Arm

Real, practical robots are few and far between in our everyday lives. The most common and recognizable ones are robot arms. They’re ubiquitous in factories and they date all the way back to 1954 when the first robot arm was patented. They perform repetitive tasks with a computer-programmed accuracy, doing jobs that are monotonous and even to help mitigate accidents. The idea was that a robot could more safely do dangerous tasks that would allow humans to focus on less dangerous ones. 

Despite the intention being less injury, the road to hell is paved with good intentions that were constructed by robotic arms. The first time a human life was lost at the hands of a robot, almost literally in this case, was in 1979 at a Ford factory.

Factory worker Robert Williams was asked to do a manual count of parts because a robot was giving inaccurate counts. He had to climb a five-story shelving unit to count all the parts and while he was there, a second robot that no one had disabled continued to do its job, which included taking parts off of those shelves. It reached in and hit Williams in the head. Reports say he died instantly, but no one realized it even happened for at least half an hour. 

9. The Japanese AI Conspiracy

This entry comes with a very large grain of salt. The story is about how military robots killed 29 scientists at a facility in Japan. Sounds terrifying, right? Well, don’t lock your doors just yet. There is a questionable layer to this tale which needs to be addressed as well. Namely, it seems like maybe this never actually happened. 

The conspiracy states that there were four autonomous military robots. Two were deactivated, the third was taken apart. But the fourth one? Well, according to award-winning journalist Linda Moulton Howe, it connected to a satellite network and taught itself how to build itself even stronger than it had been originally designed. 

It should be noted that Howe, despite being a prominent name in journalism in the 70s and 80s, is more known for her belief in UFOs these days. 

Snopes says the story has no veracity at all, but Howe insists that a contact at the CIA confirmed it for her. The story exploded after Howe gave a talk. The video has been viewed over eight million times and gave rise to a meme. So even if the real event never occurred, a lot of people likely think it did. 

8. The Ventra Ionia Arm

The Ventra Ionia factory welds and stamps truck bumpers. The employees work alongside robots to get this job done, the same as in many auto manufacturing facilities around the world. Any of these facilities has to be set up and operated in a safe and efficient way. In order to avoid accidents, humans need to stay in human-safe areas away from where the robots operate. These are not artificial intelligences, after all. They do what they’re programmed to do, so if a person gets in the way, the robots have no way to know. 

Back in 2015, Wanda Holbrook was exactly where she was supposed to be in the factory. This was not a case of a human ignoring safety protocols and taking a risk at all. She was working in her own section and being responsible. She had no way to predict that a robot arm was going to enter her work space where it was not programmed to be.

The arm hit Holbrook on the head and killed her. It was reported that other employees had noted that day that something was wrong. The robot that killed Wanda was trying to perform a task that had already been performed in a place it was not meant to be performed.

Holbrook’s husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against five robotics companies. The death happened in 2015; the lawsuit was filed in 2017, and the trial ended in 2021 when a settlement was reached. 

7. Volkswagen Germany Plant

Oftentimes when a robot causes the death of someone in a factory, it’s the result of a human error. The robot was doing what it was supposed to do and somehow a person got in the mix. Usually, that means some kind of safety measure went awry. But for a contractor in Germany back in 2015, things were a little harder to explain.

A 22-year-old man died while a robot was being installed. It wasn’t as though someone wandered into the area without following safety protocols. The worker was actually there to work on the robot itself, which is what made the situation so hard to explain. It should not have been functioning but, because the man was inside the unsafe zone around the robot, when it did activate he was in a bad spot. The arm crushed the man against a metal plate and then he died later as a result of his injuries. 

6. The Kawasaki Robot Arm

Though a robot arm had caused a fatality in America in ‘79, the first accident to compare to it in Japan happened just two years later, in 1981. 

Kenji Urada was working at a Kawasaki plant when a robot he was working near malfunctioned in some way. Urada broke safety protocols and entered an area where humans were not supposed to be in an effort to repair it. Urada was supposed to enter the proper way by opening a gate that would then shut off power. For whatever reason, he jumped over the gate instead of opening it. The result was that the power stayed on.

Urada accidentally hit the power button as he attempted to fix the arm. It powered on and crushed his body against a wall. By the time he was able to be extricated, it was too late. 

5. Robot Suicide

Suicide is a serious and devastating issue that claims over 700,000 lives per year. It’s important to recognize the signs of people who need help if and when we can, just like it’s important to know that help is available when you need it.

Sadly, 81-year-old Francis Pete Tovey of Australia was not able to find the help he needed back in 2008. Instead, the man set about conducting some research on the internet that allowed him to create a robot suicide machine.

Tovey set up his machine in the driveway of his home, feeling that if it succeeded, some nearby construction workers would be able to find his body. He gave no reason for why he did what he did and his neighbors said he seemed like a nice and friendly guy. 

The robot was a simple mechanism that was armed with a .22 caliber gun and four bullets. It shot him three times in the head. 

4. SGR-A1 Sentries

A hot button issue these days, and we’ll cover this again shortly, is the ethics behind autonomous killing machines. Is there ever a time when we can fully trust a robot to decide when and if it’s okay to take a human life? Who gets to program a robot to do these things and what are the parameters? There are a lot of questions at play with a lot of very scary ramifications. And these questions need answers because autonomous killing machines do exist today, and they’ve been at work for a few years now.

While you won’t see a killing robot down at the local Taco Bell, if you head to the DMZ between North and South Korea, you’ll find SGR-A1 sentry robots. Over 200 incursions have been attempted through this area despite the fact it’s heavily guarded on both sides. And that’s why the robot sentries were introduced.

The machines are loaded with 1,000 rounds of ammo, a grenade launcher, thermal cameras, laser rangefinders, voice recognition and more to keep track of everyone who may approach and eliminate those that don’t belong. So how many robots are there and have they actually killed anyone? Well, no one knows because that’s classified. But they’ve been in place for over a decade now. 

3. The Dallas Bomb Robot

Bomb disposal robots are not unheard of and probably most people have seen one if not on the news than in movies. They’re been in use since the 1970s. They’re actually fairly simple machines that are remotely controlled and designed to allow law enforcement access to a dangerous area without risking loss of life. As the name suggests, these get sent in to trigger or dismantle bombs. So technically, these things are meant to save lives. Technically. 

In 2016, the police department in Dallas somewhat repurposed their bomb robot. A sniper had started taking out police officers and five were already dead while seven more were injured. Police rigged their bomb disposal robot with a bomb and sent it into the room where the shooter was taking cover after negotiations broke down. The explosion went off, and the suspect was killed immediately. It was the first time in history that the police had used a robot to intentionally kill someone. 

2. The Self-Driving Uber

Twenty years ago the idea of robots actually influencing our lives was a lot more fictitious than it is today. We’d still joke about the Terminator or the Matrix becoming real “one day.” But today, robots that have a direct and real impact on our everyday lives are real and they’re out among us all the time, even if they don’t look like giant, metal squids or skeletons. Take, for instance, the self-driving car. They’ve already caused human fatalities. 

Elaine Herzeberg was riding her bike in 2018 when an Uber ran into her at 39 miles per hour. There was a human in the car at the time but they were watching an episode of The Voice on their phone. The driving was being done by the car’s AI.

Self-driving cars are intended to have a real, human backup behind the wheel in case something goes wrong. But if the driver is watching TV and not paying attention, they’re obviously not very helpful. 

The driver was charged with negligent homicide because a human is supposed to be the safety net behind a self-driving car. The trial has been delayed several times due to Covid, however, so there’s no word yet on whether human or machine will ultimately be held responsible. 

1. The AI Machine Gun

Robots killing humans by accident are terrifying. Robots designed explicitly to kill humans are a dystopian nightmare. The AI machine gun is about as simple, brutal and horrifying as any robot could possibly be. 

In 2020, an Iranian nuclear scientist was shot to death near Tehran. General Ali Fadavi, the second highest ranking official in Iran’s Islam Revolutionary Guard Corps said the weapon that killed the scientist fired with such pinpoint accuracy that it was able to take him out but not hit his wife sitting right next to him. It’s worth noting that this claim was not verified elsewhere. So what actually happened?

The official word that we have now is that Israel assassinated the scientist, known as the “Father of the Iranian Bomb” with the backing of the United States. A satellite-controlled AI machine used facial recognition to target the scientist and take him out from the back of a pickup truck that later exploded. The attack lasted just three minutes.

While robots haven’t yet taken over our daily lives like classic science fiction writers imagined, robotics has still advanced quite a lot in the past few years. From playing music to cooking world cuisine to ruthlessly murdering anyone in a given area, robots of today are capable of much more than we give them credit for. 

10. Play Live Music

If you watch this robot playing the peculiar Soviet-era instrument, theremin – played entirely with hand gestures in the air – you’d think that it was just programmed to make those movements. Interestingly, it wasn’t – developed by researchers at the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, the robot is listening to music and replicating it entirely on its own. It can even play with other musicians, complete with visual cues and changes in tempo according to what their partner is playing.

It’s only one of the many ways roboticists around the world are experimenting with robots and live music. You can find many online videos of robot rock bands that can play as well as – if not better than – real-life musicians. Robots are inherently more durable and technically capable, as you can design them however you want and they don’t get tired. 

What robots still can’t do, however, is make music like a person, as that still involves the human brain and the specific way it perceives music. 

9. Kill Tumors

Until recently, the idea that tiny, microscopic robots that can perform complicated surgical procedures was largely confined to the realm of science fiction. That’s no longer the case, as advances in both robotics and nanotechnology in the past few years have caused a proliferation of a variety of medical nanobots. One can only imagine the potential medical applications of microscopic machines that could be programmed to do anything.

While it’d be a while before all of them are realized, nanobots of today can already do a lot. In a study published in Nature Biotechnology back in 2018, researchers developed microscopic bots capable of swarming tumor cells and cutting off their blood supply with clotting. Made by folding DNA fragments – a technique known as DNA origami – and a blood-clotting enzyme called thrombin, these nanobots were successfully tested on mice. 

Of course, humans and mice have some…fundamental differences in anatomy, so it’d be a while before nanobots could completely eradicate cancer. Research is still in its early phases, however, and these results are promising.

8. Rock Paper Scissors

Janken is a robot named after the Japanese version of Rock Paper Scissors. It’s usually used as a fair choosing method between two choices, much like a coin toss, except there’s nothing fair about the robot. Developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo, Janken isn’t merely good at the game – it’s perhaps the only player with a consistent 100% win rate at it. 

It might look like Janken is extremely good at prediction, though that’s not actually what it’s doing. It’s merely reacting to the gesture of the opposing player with the help of high speed cameras, only fast enough to make it seem instantaneous. 

While it’s clear that Janken can’t be taken seriously at a professional Rock Paper Scissors tournament – as that’s technically cheating – response and reaction time is an ongoing matter of study within robotics. It’s especially applicable in areas like autonomous vehicles, where response time should be as close to zero as possible. 

7. Assemble IKEA Furniture

This one might not seem as impressive as some of the other robots on this list, though it’s still a job many people struggle with. Putting IKEA furniture together is a universally hated chore that is – for some reason – incredibly difficult to get right, even with explicit, illustrated instructions. One only needs to search ‘IKEA furniture assembly tips’  or something similar on Google to really know the extent of the problem.

Thankfully, engineers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore designed a robot that can assemble any IKEA product you throw at it. It’s a basic setup, equipped with two arms and grippers, and can already assemble a chair in less than 20 minutes.

While it’s not commercially available as of now and still requires a learning phase with every new product it encounters – so it’s not helping anyone, really – it’s an ongoing project. The team is now working on teaching the robot how to assemble something by reading the instruction manual, or even just by looking at the final product.

6. Police

If you make a trip to Dubai, you’d likely come across robot police officers unlike anything you might have seen before. While it’s not really armed or capable of any kind of violence – as you can only use it to report crime, pay fines and other minor clerical tasks right now – it’s a part of a worrying trend around the world. 

It’s not just Dubai, either – from Singapore to India to Israel, police departments are increasingly turning to robots for police work. Crowd control is one of the more worrying potential applications of robotics, and one area we can be sure robots will be extensively used in the future. With unrest and protests getting more and more common around the world, countries are looking for innovative, modern ways to police their own citizens. 

5. Self Assemble

Self assembling robots form a part of the larger field of modular robotics, which deals with designing individual robotic parts working with each other in real time instead of the fixed-shape robots we’re used to seeing today. It’s the future, really, allowing engineers to build entirely new types of dynamic machines depending on what they need at the time, somewhat like the self-healing, self-assembling T-800 model from the Terminator movies. 

As it stands right now, all that is well into the future, though we do have the first prototypes of what these modular robots would look like. M-Blocks is an ongoing project at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where they’ve designed 16 cube-shaped, 50mm X 50mm bots that can communicate with each other and carry out simple tasks, like arranging themselves into a line and moving. SMORES-EP is another similar project at the University of Pennsylvania, though their bots are a bit more advanced with better mobility,, as each module comes with its own set of wheels. 

4. Parkour

Even if almost everyone has heard of Boston Dynamics and their quest to build the most terrifying robot possible at this point, their machines belong on any list of modern robotic accomplishments. Atlas, perhaps their most advanced humanoid robot, was recently recorded completing an obstacle course, complete with a backflip at the end. While it might not look like much on first look, before Atlas, it was next to impossible to make a robot move like we do. 

While it might have many civilian applications, too, Atlas is sure to be deployed on a battlefield some day, as Boston Dynamics has previously designed militarized robotic dogs for DARPA and regularly works with military-grade prototypes. Practically speaking, there’s no real, everyday advantage to designing robots to mimic how we walk or run, except inducing pure terror in the minds of whoever they’re running towards. 

3. Cook

Many people consider cooking to be one of those jobs that can’t be taken over by robots. The most glaring problem is their lack of real taste buds, as it’s impossible for a robot to really know how good – or bad – something tastes. It also requires a surprisingly high level of dexterity – just think of how many types of unique gestures one has to make to cook something as simple as a sandwich from scratch. 

Sadly, at least for professional chefs, that might not be the case for long. In fact, we already have the first fully-functioning robotic chef in the market, even if it’s a bit too costly to replace real chefs any time soon. Designed by a london-based robotics firm, Moley Robotics, the robotic kitchen – costing well over $300,000 – is really just a fancy, state-of-the-art kitchen with two robotic arms dangling down from the top. It’s capable of cooking anything in the world on its own, and the firm plans to add a total of 5,000 recipes to it over time. 

2. Perform Surgery

The idea that robots would someday be used to perform surgery on people would have sounded outlandish even a few years ago, though that’s no longer the case. Hospitals around the world are increasingly opting for robot-assisted surgeries, performed remotely by actual surgeons controlling a specialized, state-of-the-art robot.

As you can guess, it provides many advantages over the traditional method. Usually, surgeons opt for an open surgery, where they cut open nearby areas to see what they’re doing. With a remote-controlled robot equipped with enough cameras, the same procedure can now be done much more precisely through a smaller surgical cut, reducing the risk of infection or bleeding complications. 

Admittedly, the procedure isn’t automated and still requires a human specialist, which would likely always be the case for complicated, intricate surgical procedures. For routine procedures, however, automated robots could be a viable option, and we already have prototypes that can perform some automated procedures on animals.

1. Assassinate

We know what you’re thinking, and it isn’t what it sounds like – it’s actually way more horrifying. Giving robots the ability to kill people is the sort of thing movies and books usually warn us about, though behind the scenes, they’re already well past production and into the deployment stage. 

The first and perhaps only documented case of a military robot eliminating a political target happened in Iran on November 27, 2020, when an AI-assisted robotic sniper gun was used to assassinate its top nuclear scientist. While it was never officially admitted, the killing was reportedly carried out by Israel’s Mossad operatives through a remote-controlled, AI-equipped sniper robot placed inside a vehicle, as revealed by a New York Times report. According to Iranian investigators, the AI was so accurate that it precisely targetted the scientist and spared his wife and other people in his entourage, possibly with the help of facial recognition software.