Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants them to battle it out at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Long-suffering South Korean baseball team the Hanwa Eagles (think 400 losses in five years) uses them as proxies to ‘liven up’ games. And US President Barack Obama recently went toe-to-toe with one in a rather unusual game of soccer. From Greek god Hephaestus’ talking mechanical handmaidens to Robonaut 2, the first humanoid in space, robots have long occupied hallowed ground in that most fertile of territories, the human mind.
In 322BC, taking up an earlier reference in Homer’s Iliad, Aristotle speculated in Politics that automatons could someday bring about human equality by making possible the abolition of slavery: “There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that ‘Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus’, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.”
Rather more recently in human (and humanoid) history, robots – defined by most roboticists as a programmable brain that moves a body – have become a point of fascination for Thai artist Jitti Jumnianwai, who specialises in “robots and spaceships for adults and children alike”. His most artistic of automatons, intricate and detailed to the last, cannot fail to touch those whose lives were forever changed by the original Star Wars trilogy. Here, sci-fi meets a childlike aesthetic that somehow becomes modern art. Of his inspiration, the artist, a 2005 graduate of Chiang Mai University, says it “stems in part from the toys I played with as a child, and in my paintings I want to express the happiness I felt when a child”.
WHO: Jitti Jumnianwai
WHAT: Robots exhibition opening
WHERE: Tepui @ Chinese House, Sisowath Quay & Street 84
WHEN: 7pm August 1
WHY: “You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.” – Sir Isaac Asimov