Making life: a brief history of human-robot interaction

This article is based on a talk for the Third Annual Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking lecture at Rochester Institute of Technology, which took place on 23 September 2014. The talk weaved together a brief history of robots, feral data, the internet of things, and consumer materiality to illuminate how life infuses our imagination of technology. This article illuminates the intersection of culture and technology and provides a lively history of the interactions between humans and robots.