ABSTRACT
Whether we recognize it as such or not, we are in the midst of a robot invasion. Autonomous machines are now everywhere and doing everything. We chat with them online, we play with them in digital games, we interact with them in social networks, and we rely on their capabilities to help us organize and manage many aspects of our increasingly data-rich, digital lives. It seems Norbert Wiener, the progenitor of cybernetics-the science of control and communication-was right when he made the following prediction in The Human Use of Human Beings : ‘It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever increasing part’ (Wiener, 1954, p. 16).
