Robots and robotics, the two ambiguous terms, have gained more traction after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. From automating the industry chains to monitoring the public crowd, the resourcefulness in the pandemic is undeniable. Before that, robots have already worked in environments or job lines that are deemed hostile or beyond the basic scope of humans. In short, they have always been there in our hard times and have enabled us to move towards a digitally enhanced future. During this global health emergency, robots have helped us either by carrying health samples, distributing ration, test kits, sanitizing public spaces, conducting surveillance, and many more lifesaving acts.

I have been interested in robots and robotics since I was very young. The term robot is attributed to the author Karel Čapek through his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which includes a factory that makes artificial people called roboti (robots) from synthetic organic matter.1 Most of us think of robots as mechanical contraptions, but the robots in R.U.R. were artificial humanoids grown from a process that produced living, thinking beings. My interest in robots was stimulated sometime in the 1960s by reading the novel I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.2 Since then, our imaginations have been sparked by other robots, including Gort, the menacing protector in The Day the Earth Stood Still;3 the robot in the television series and movie Lost in Space ("Danger, Will Robinson! Some of the robots have been humaniform (e.g., Gort, Hector, C-3PO, and Data) and others have not (e.g., HAL and R2-D2). I also remember as a teenager reading the comic books about Magnus, Robot Fighter, a human trained by a robot to battle rogue robots in the year 4000.10 The robotics imagined by Isaac Asimov followed (for the most part) four laws of robotics that he formulated: "(0) A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

In President-elect Trump's interview with the NY Times yesterday, when discussing jobs, closed factories and factories that may leave the country, he was asked: "Are you worried that those companies will keep their factories here, but the jobs will be replaced by robots? They will, and we'll make the robots too. It's a big thing, we'll make the robots too. Right now we don't make the robots. But we're going to, I mean, look, robotics is becoming very big and we're going to do that.