THE PLACE TO BE
LET’S GET TOGETHER: Dutch architect Joris Laarman’s rendering of his self-building bridge, on show at Vitra Design Museum.
JORIS LAARMAN LAB
ROBOTS WILL destroy us; robots will save us. These two pop-culture narratives have competed since the word robot first appeared, in R.U.R., a 1920 Czech play by Karel Capek in which machines designed to help humanity instead decide to wipe us out. It’s the same ambivalence that sits at the center of “Hello, Robot,” an exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. Robots—ranging from artificial-intelligence chatbots that are convincingly human in conversation to robotic prosthetics that transform the lives of amputees—display the evolving relationship between humans and machines, with a focus on their design.