Why do we make robots look like ourselves?
Inside the enduring appeal of machines that look, move, and increasingly think like humans.
Almost 3,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians developed a statuette whose arms raised thanks to a pulley-like system. Millennia later, roboticists are still obsessed with designing mechanical imitations of humans, now called humanoids. The quest to build them is akin to chasing an “almost godlike power,” says Ken Goldberg, a robotics expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Every engineer dreams of creating a humanlike robot—it’s the ultimate machine.” Cutting-edge hardware and software, like artificial intelligence, have led to remarkable progress in enabling humanoids to walk, run, and jump—though Goldberg says tasks relating to human dexterity (organizing objects on a cluttered kitchen counter, for example) remain challenging. For the past two years, photographer Henrik Spohler has documented these advancements, from a clunky arm with exposed wiring to a recent model capable of sorting laundry. “Human hubris astonishes me,” he says.
