The ALL-Life Project was born in 1950 along with the first Experimental/Service and Military robots.
This Project was meant to build a whole new breed of robots on the basis of three essential pillars:
- The robot must be intelligent, able to feel emotions and to live at least as long as a human being (if not longer)
- The robot must be raised according to the human evolutive stages (infancy, adolescence, etc.) so that it can learn from experience and develop abilities similar to those of the human species in order to interact and get along with people without causing conflicts
- The robot must be able to reproduce itself.
The Project creators named it “All-Life” because of its main goal: to have robots simulate human life and live like humans. Robots that would be human-like to be able to understand their creators and help them on the road to progress and welfare.
And that of human-machine friendship.
The Problem with ALL-Life Robots
However, the project revealed itself quite delusive to many scientists, including prof. Albert (Microshot‘s creator) and prof. Steiner (Titanus‘ creator).
[pictures of the scientists]
That happened for two reasons mainly:
- The robots they created were so intelligent and human-like that they risked to outrank human beings in several areas of life, and to be regarded on the same level as human beings themselves
- It was way too hard and time consuming to raise a robot as a child.
In fact, the downside of the Project was that the robots created a family bond with their creators, and viceversa, to the extent that selling or renting became very difficult or impossible.
Because of these issues, many of these scientists abandoned the Project — and their creations with it.
Many of these rejected mechanical beings eventually found refuge in the city of Rolamaton in Italy, although they preserved vivid memories of their “parents”, no matter any past involving betrayal or abuse.