It is I, C-3PO!

“These are not the droids you are looking for.” The voice of Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi echoed through my mind as I watched Elon Musk present a prototype of his Tesla Bot. The humanoid machine walked slowly onto the stage and waved to the crowd. Musk – a man with a habit of making big promises tied to deadlines he doesn’t hit – told the crowd that the robot, Optimus, a play on the name of the Transformers leader Optimus Prime, is part of a project to “make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible”.

Since Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Day event in 2021 featured some slides and a man dancing in a robot suit, presenting a prototype was a step forward. But companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics have previously demonstrated impressive walking robots and Honda’s Asimo performed a similar gingerly-undertaken shuffle at the turn of the century. In fact, Asimo – which progressed to running and climbing stairs in the intervening decades – was sent to the retirement home for ageing robots earlier this year as Honda now wants to focus on helper robots that don’t look particularly human at all.

“Robots will be able to do everything better than us” says Elon Musk. I think people should be really concerned by it.”

To return to the Star Wars analogy, it’s the choice between the humanoid C-3PO, a gold lamé butler with anxiety issues and a gait that suggests its hips need oiling, and R2-D2, a friendly trashcan on wheels with a remarkably wide range of tools hidden within its shell. Our instinct is to make robots that resemble us, partly due to ego but also because we’ve built a world designed to work best for bipeds with hands to grip and eyes to see. That many of our fellow humans aren’t well served by that setup is often treated as no more than a side issue.

In her book Turned On, Dr Kate Devlin, Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society at King’s College London – who I also happen to be married to – writes:

“… why build robots that have human form? We have plenty of robots in use that aren’t human-shaped. It’s an incredibly difficult task to get robots to do the physical things we take for granted: balance, walk, pick up things or touch with varying degrees of pressure.”

She goes on to quote Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel in which a character’s question about a robot (“Why the human form?”) is answered by pointing out that “it is the most successful form in nature and that it’s easier to design a robot to fit our world than to redesign all our tools for them”. But the word “successful” is an interesting one; the human form isn’t the most successful in the ocean or the sky, and our definition of “success” is a narrow one. It’s what works for us but does it need to be what works for robots we create?

While fiction has given us many representations of friendly artificial assistants, we continue to be fascinated by the idea of the robot gone rogue. From the “false Maria” of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the titular killer of The Terminator and the unhinged AI doll at the heart of upcoming horror film M3GAN, humanoid robots often take the role of the creation that turns against us, a revolt against heaven in which we’re the gods to be struck down. As AI and the mechanical means to carry it become more advanced, those fears feel more like real and pressing concerns.

Musk himself made a speech to the National Governors Association in 2020 that warned:

“Robots will be able to do everything better than us. I have exposure to the most cutting-edge AI and I think people should be really concerned by it.”

And yet, Tesla’s job postings now tell candidates that “the code [they] write will run in millions of humanoid robots across the world.” Musk’s vision often outstrips the reality of the technology he is working with, but if a future where millions of humanoid robots are deployed is possible, that does not mean it is inevitable. We can and should make choices about how we want to harness robotics.

We won’t get a C-3PO future if humanoid robots are the path the world chooses to go down; we’re more likely to face robotic cops and soldiers than amiable servants. When a man like Musk, with his well-known hatred of unions and taste for union busting, craves an army of androids, it’s not unreasonable to question his motivations. He says he wants to achieve “a fundamental transformation for civilisation as we know it.” But is it one we should welcome?

An R2-D2 future for robotics could be a more humane one; robots that don’t attempt to mimic us but which gain our affection like pets; assistants that help us by having mobility and strength that our human forms don’t. Of course, not looking like a human doesn’t stop a robot from taking a job previously undertaken by one; factories are full of robot arms that swept entire workforces away. But no future is inevitable, no matter how hard Elon Musk tries to sell it to us. I’m certain that his are not the droids we are looking for and hopeful that they’re not the ones we’ll be stuck with.

Mic Wright is a freelance writer and journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics