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Robots as iconic images are associated with Star Wars and The Terminator, yet they have more to do with politics than with science fiction. The first robots were created in an age of rebellious political and social upheaval. Eighty-five years ago, the robot made its first appearance in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek. In R.U.R., robots are mass-produced to work in place of people. The term is taken from the Slavic “robota”, which means forced labour.

R.U.R. was never made into a blockbuster movie, nor is it widely known as the source of the robot. So when I hosted the Robot Project – a festival of films, talks and art exhibits in Cambridge, UK, last month – I made sure it featured performances of the play.

The play has striking relevance today, as roboticists are creating humanoid robots, and the question of what makes us human is at the forefront of many debates.

In Japan, predictions of labour shortages are funding efforts to build more robots to help avert this perceived crisis. Many other efforts in robotics, though, aim to create not mindless worker drones but human-like companions for people. In the US, the field of “sociable robotics” has emerged, and some researchers argue that we are seeing the first steps in the creation of a companion species of robots. Japanese roboticists also speak positively about a future in which people will live side by side with animate machines. All of this raises the question: can a human have a meaningful relationship with a machine?

In the attempt to make human-friendly robots, aesthetics play a major role. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I conducted social anthropological studies, roboticists are creating machines with human-like faces and bodies. The robot Mertz, created by MIT’s Lijin Aryananda, has a gentle face and large eyes, which the maker deliberately designed to appear childlike. Mertz can smile, frown and repeat sounds that are spoken to it. It is the kind of robot that may one day be used to attend to elderly people. In fact, elderly care by robots is under consideration as a healthcare solution.

Robotic technology is surely still in its infancy. Technological commentators such as Ray Kurzweil predict that intelligent machines and robots will overtake humanity, but the possibility of robots taking over the world or even performing simple chores remains very much a fantasy. Honda’s Asimo, for example, is renowned as an advanced robot, but it is remote-controlled and can only perform a limited range of pre-planned actions. The Ifbot robot, which is meant to display more than 40 emotions, seems to spin these out independently of what is going on around it.

Despite the simplicity of today’s models, the field of robotics is making a dramatic impact on our culture. The most important changes have come not from the technology, but from the way we have begun to question what it means to be human, and how humans differ (or don’t) from machines. This is highlighted by the debate over whether it is possible for humans to have relationships with robots in the same way they would with living creatures. Robotic toys such as the Tamagotchi virtual pets or Sony’s Aibo dog suggest that it is indeed possible. In the case of the Tamagotchi, people have described a feeling of loss at the “death” of their virtual pets, and some have even taken their “dead” pets to specially created burial grounds.

Children tend to display more relaxed distinctions between what is human and non-human. This is not a particularly new observation – Sigmund Freud wrote about it in The Uncanny over 80 years ago. But what does it mean when adults relax the boundaries between human and machine? To encourage adult interactions with robots, roboticists deliberately design their robots to be childlike so that human interlocutors lower their expectations and assist the robot’s development, as a carer would a child. It seems the meaning of human-robot encounters has less to do with what the robot can do and more to do with what the human is doing, prepared to do or prepared to imagine is occurring in the encounter.

It is not just the field of humanoid robotics that is expanding; there is a general shift to create sentient or emotional machines. Why are we seeking to make our machines more like humans? Will these new creatures be capable of substituting human beings, not just as workers, but as companions too? As our machines take on more human qualities, an interest in robot ethics is emerging – a sign that people do believe we might relate to robots as we do to one another. We have come a long way from the post-war fantasies of domestic robots doing household chores.

“Sociable” robots display sentient and emotional cues on the surface, but surely that is not enough to replace a human companion. Then again, as an MIT researcher said, “All we know is what is on the surface.” We have no access to a fellow human’s internal world. If external signals comprise the entirety of our interaction with humans, does it matter if they come from a human or a machine?

Whether it is possible to have a relationship with a robot depends on what we consider important in our human relationships. Does our knowledge that another human has far more bubbling beneath the surface than their smiles and frowns suggest allow for a more genuine interaction? Or are a few smiles and frowns all we need? It is not surprising that robot trials have shown much success in elderly communities, where people are already socially isolated. As our sense of human relationships diminishes, the possibilities for robot relationships increase. Our culture’s growing misanthropic attitude feeds into the meaning we assign to our technology.

“We are seeing the first steps in the creation of a companion species”

Our contemporary notions of the robot are a world away from its original conception. The first robots, in R.U.R., are made of flesh and blood and look indistinguishable from human beings. It was not Capek who made his robots metallic or mechanical but other artists in the 1920s and 1930s. The mechanical robot then became the iconic image that symbolised the creature for the bulk of the past 85 years. In fact, this reinterpretation of his robotic creatures led Capek in 1935 to write: “It is with horror…that metal contraptions could ever replace human beings, and that by means of wires they could awaken something like life, love or rebellion…This dark prospect [is] either an overestimation of machines, or a grave offence against life.”

Capek feared that the robot was not being used to comment on aspects of being human, as he had intended. Instead, people became obsessed with the robot’s machine nature – as they still are. In our production of Capek’s play, I wanted the robot to be human-like as he had intended, allowing audiences to use the robot as an impetus to explore what it means to connect with one another and what it means to be human.