In Praise of Useless Robots

Summary

In Praise Of Useless RobotsThe most intriguing robots aren’t built to work, but to make us imagine other worlds.Credit: Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen, "After Care" (Copenhagen Contemporary, 2025)BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently.A few months ago, I visited the Futurism retrospective organized to mark the 80th anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s death at the National Gallery in Rome. The rooms were filled with archives of an ultra-modernist machinic dream: posters, paintings, and sculptures coexisted alongside engines, telegraphs, cars, and airplanes. It was impossible to ignore the voice of the visionary ideologue of Futurism echoing through the sober neoclassical halls of the museum: “We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”For the Futurists, every machine was, essentially, a time-machine: more than tools designed to perform a specific task, technological objects were the historical embodiment of humanity’s universal drive toward progress. Looking beyond the notoriously controversial implications of its political affiliations, the genius of the Futurist avant-garde was its intuition that the evolution of machines could capture cultural transformations better than any other human practice. And thus, even the arts and letters — the highest expressions of humanism — had to listen to the roar of engines.In October 2021, visitors to London’s Tate Modern entered a space populated by visions of a very different future. Floating, semi-transparent organisms hovered slowly in the air like seraphic creatures from the ocean’s depths. These aerobes, as they were baptized by Korean-American artist Anicka Yi, who conceived them, are pachydermic, calm, and silent. These flying automata respond to human presence, changing altitude and behavior based on the proximity of people in the space. “When you look at these aerobes, it gives you a feeling almost opposite to the uncan...