G. R. Rossum's Universal Robots

With the development of technology in the world, people are faced with many things they never saw and knew before. In this modern life, technology has affected a lot in people’s lives in many levels. Robot is considered as an important product of technology. Robot was introduced by a writer, Karel Čapek, from the Czech word, robota, meaning “forced labor” or “serf”. Čapek used the word Robot in his play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which opened in Prague in January, 1921, a play in which automata are mass-produced by an Englishman named Rossum. The automata, robots, are meant to do the world’s work and to make a better life for human beings; but in the end they rebel, wipe out humanity, and start a new race of intelligent life for

Thus, they create more innovations toward robots to fulfill the demand from the industries and people. As in the future, there will be robots that are as intelligent and powerful as humans, even more than mankind. It is unclear whether there would be place for humans, even for skilled people, in a world containing very intelligent machines. The best example would be humanoid robots. A humanoid robot has a head equipped with some of the sensors in human head, such as vision or audition, added with anthropomorphic appearance (resembling an upright human body), sometimes with artificial muscles and humanlike legs and arms. It has mobility, using legs or wheels. It also has some cognitive ability, enabling it to process information received from the sensors and has ability to interact with humans. Humanoids can have ability to express emotions and to respond to human emotions, robots that have this ability are termed as anthropopathic (Bekey, 2005). Humanoids can do things that even people are unable to do. Humanoid can be used to help people, especially elderly people and children. Besides, it can be used for education, entertainment or house works. But what would be people’s reaction when they know they can have the twin of them? Yes, it is happening now. Just take the example of the robotic twin of Zou Ren Ti, Chinese Researcher or the twin of Japanese professor, Hiroshi Ishiguro. The robots have the same characteristic as their human twin and have a full body sensory array (Grogan, 2013). Many scientists are developing this kind of robots nowadays. But when it comes to a point where people cannot differentiate between the real human and his/her robotic twin, can people still be happy and proud about it? Or until people treat robots and other technology products the same way as they treat human. Despite the advantages from the development of technology,