So of course, my esteemed colleague Tina decided to lob a grenade at me by asserting that a dishwasher is a robot.

There are two ways I could womansplain to her just how wrong she is. One is to meet her at her level by debating the technical definition. My primary technical issue with her explanation is that I do not agree with how she describes the “manipulation” capabilities of a dishwasher. The spray arms and soap release mechanisms are just that, mechanisms – they do not handle objects, and manipulation is about handling objects. Dishwashers are absolutely automated systems, and increasingly smart ones (though I side-eye the manufacturer that makes my dishwasher calling it “fully autonomous” because it cracks it open on completion to let everything cool). But they’re not robots. They fall short of the technical definition Tina used.

But the alternative I prefer is to inform Tina that she is wrong because robots are not actually defined by their technology, so arguing that way is meaningless. The word, and how we choose to apply it, is entirely a social construct.

“Robot” as a term is an invention of science fiction – and specifically, of Karel Čapek in his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. Robots continued to be explored through science fiction for decades before the first thing called a robot became a product you could buy. Automated machines not called robots existed well before the word was coined, and continue to exist today. And that’s because “robot” is not actually a descriptor of technical functionality; it is used to describe an automated machine we feel some kind of way about.

It’s specifically because the word and the concept were invented and developed through science fiction that this is the case. Science fiction spends a lot of time using the idea of aliens, robots, and artificial intelligence as a lens through which to view ourselves as humans.¹ It’s why Spock and Data and The Doctor and Seven of Nine are all such compelling characters in Star Trek – they exist as narrative constructs through which to ask the question “what does it mean to be human?”2

So that’s why we choose to apply the term “robot” to some automated machines and not others. We use the term for technologies which feel new, a little scary, and make our squishy biological brains feel a little bit weird about what this technology might mean for us. We might be worried about what this technology having some particular capability means about our jobs, or our relationships with other people, or our areas of expertise or talent. Technology that looks like the human form or appears to imitate aspects of human consciousness might make us question a religious belief we may hold about how life is created. Our interactions with something that looks and sounds human might make us think uncomfortable thoughts about how we (individually or as a society) treat other human beings. Or we might realize that public discourse about how great it would be to have something that looks like a human, sounds like a human, and has all the capability of a human, but without any rights or bathroom breaks or pay in exchange for its labor feels pretty gross, actually, if you’ve thought literally at all about how our history of slavery has had an impact on so many aspects of modern America.

We see this in the way what we call a “robot” has changed and evolved over time, and the way that change is so tightly correlated with the novelty of the technology and the degree to which we feel we understand the potential societal implications of it. Outside of sci fi, “robot” used to just mean robotic arms used in assembly lines. When I attended the RoboBusiness conference circa 2007, I remember the conference information specifically stating it was NOT for industrial robotic arms because they didn’t consider those robots anymore. Meanwhile, Roombas were state of the art and everyone was excited about wheeled mobile robots. A decade later, industrial robotic arms were allowed back in because power- and force-limited cobots and advanced vision systems attached to robot arms opened up novel new applications and capabilities that people had only just started to contemplate being automatable. These days, many folks are happy to laugh off the Roomba and robotic lawn mowers as “basically a toy” and humanoid robots are (unfairly) scaring the crap out of everyone about their job prospects (or safety in the face of someone’s robot army). All of these things meet the ISO definition of robot that Tina used, but as a culture, we’ve moved on to calling something new a “robot” and starting to demote the other stuff because we’re not impressed with (read: scared of) it anymore.

In short, a machine is a robot when it makes us sit with uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

And my dishwasher does not force me to examine my own existential purpose.

QED. Not a robot.

1. And monsters as well. What do you think Frankenstein was about? ↩︎
2. Sometimes very explicitly, as in the most excellent Next Generation episode, The Measure of a Man↩︎