"Assigning all the inevitable but blunt or difficult or dangerous work to robots means to keep them away from the kind of activity which is perceived as human.

Faced with this state of segregation between wo/men and robots, Roboexotica is trying to get interaction with end-users back on the agenda of robotronics.  The aim is a reversal of the classic alienation process used to determine the robot-human-relationship on the basis of a capitalist logic.

So, if we were asked to come up with some of the differences between the old-school-scifi-utopia based on robots and the semi-utopia and quarter-scifi-world we're living in, we would point out:

'First, there are no robots in my household - or at least no robots with which I could have that good old slaveholder-servant-conversation my parents and grandparents were dreaming of.  Fuck, I was promised I could be a Southern Gentle(wo)man without the moral implications.  And now there are plenty of intelligent machines running my life - but they don't have a HAL-voice and they don't have feelings like Data in 'Star Trek' enabling me to poke fun at them and to experience tragic moments.  They are just tools I can trust.  And what I find most frightening: they never ever try to kill me and take over.  They are just boring automatons and AI-bullshit.  They are slaves that are no fun.  No weeping kids at night, no 'Uncle Robot Tom'-bestsellers, no liberation movement to make us middle class people feel good in supporting it half-assedly - just dull machines which never complain.  No deep, sad and touching musical expression lies within robot slavery to be enjoyed by dissident slaveholder kids.  Maybe that is just the price we pay for not giving them a soul and maybe future investigations into the resoulment of robots would bring relief.  I mean, what's the point in having slaves if they don't suffer from it.'

[...]

Thus, Roboexotica wanted to work on a collective interface to remind us of the pristine idea of robots serving us and to focus again on the full cultural meaning of robots: capitalist slaves for all tomorrow's cocktail parties."

-- Frank Apunkt Schneider and Gunther Friesinger in Mixing robots with discourse by having them mix drinks, in the monochrom-published Roboexotica book.

(I realize this is off-topic for my blog, but I loved these sentiments and wanted to share them.)