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Sharp is 100 years old this month so Humans Invent decided to challenge five of its brightest minds to foretell what the world will look like a century from now. We conducted a series of six workshops on topics ranging from health to energy to assess how these fields will have changed by the year 2112. In this series we discover the possibility of nanorobots swimming through your veins, driverless cars and space hotels, multi-sensory entertainment and virtual reality in the classroom. Though the five scientists disagree at times on what the future may hold, they certainly agree on one thing: the world will be a very different place in 100 years’ time. Yesterday we looked at
energy; today we imagine how far robotics will have advanced in 100 years time.
6. Robotics
What will robots look like in the future?
The group believes robots will be an integral part of society in the future, used in everything from surgery to housecleaning. Interestingly, however, they think there will some resistance to creating a robot that looks too humanoid.
Research Manager, Valerie Berryman-Bousquet, draws parallels with Star Wars. She says, “I think the robots will be more like R2-D2 than C-3PO in the future because it looks like a robot, it is cute, it doesn’t look like a human. You could consider having it in your home doing some aspect of your housework.”
At the end of the workshop series we placed the illustrations and set of films in a time capsule and buried it in the garden at Sharp Laboratories of Europe. Who knows, if people unearth the capsule in a 100 hundred years’ time they may be surprised at how accurate the scientists were in predicting the future. Then again, they may laugh at how wrong we were.
Illustrations exclusively drawn for Humans Invent by Neil Jones.
Humans Invent and Sharp Laboratories of Europe buried the set of films and illustrations in a time capsule on location at the labs in Oxford. In 100 years the scientists of the future will break the capsule open and uncover its contents.
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