Jakub Rozalski paints robots and futuristic war machines by placing them in the pastoral landscape of a Polish village from the beginning of the 20th century. The history of robots is at least a century behind this interesting alternative, but robots enter us in a similar way as Rozalski sees them - vaguely and imperceptibly, while we are in the forefront of other business. You may not know it, but the revolution in the application of robots in real life is just happening.
Jakub Różalski (born 1981), also known as Mr. Werewolf, is a Polish artist. He is best known as the illustrator of the board game Scythe and related paintings, commonly featuring mythical, fantastical beasts, robots and similar concepts. His style combines the classic art style of late 18th and early 19th century paintings with modern fantasy and science fiction concepts.
The 2016 board game Scythe was inspired by his art; Różalski has contributed dozens of illustrations for the game. It is the first major work in what Różalski calls the 1920+ universe, set in an alternative history universe, around the time of the Polish – Soviet War, but incorporating science fiction elements like dieselpunk or steampunk airships and mecha. The next major installment in the 1920+ series is the Iron Harvest real-time strategy video game, in development by King Art Games, announced in 2016. The game had a successful crowdfunding phase in 2018 and has been released in September of 2020.
Smart machines already do all sorts of jobs - in the military, space exploration, industrial plants, hospitals, transportation and as Rozalski paints - in the countryside. True, robots generally do not march across cereal fields, but they are increasingly helpful in agriculture. In the "Walzicht" nursery in the Netherlands, for example, a robot has been installed that plants 18,000 flower seedlings every hour. Robots such as Lely Astronaut milk cows on farms, first identifying each individual throat based on the collar. Robots such as those produced by Abundant Robotics pick apples and other fruits on plantations and orchards, using pumps instead of hands.
The history of industrial robots began in 1950 with George Devol’s famous Unimat robot, which is actually a hand with several degrees of freedom that can be programmed to perform various tasks. These robots entered General Motors ’factories long before anyone thought of a smart cooler or smart light bulb. Even today, robots perform precise, but mostly repetitive, repetitive tasks. They differ from ordinary electrical and thermodynamic machines primarily in that they are programmed to perform various tasks and, if necessary, to make decisions.
Robots are also engaged in other delicate jobs, for example where there is more confidence in the robot than in humans - in mints or plants where banknote change machines are assembled. Such is the robot named Pound, which was produced by the Japanese company "Kewada Robotics". Robots are also in hospitals - one of the most famous in the world is Moxie, a robot in the American hospital in Dallas who helps nurses bring food, make bedding and other non-medical jobs.
When John McCarthy coined the "artificial intelligence" (AI) coin in 1956, defining it as "the science and technique of making intelligent machines," expectations of robots seemed much faster. In the sixties, it became clear to many that mechanical problems seemed unsolvable - robots were not able to walk, but also to "think". This period of almost complete shutdown of robotics is therefore often called "AI winter", after the example of "nuclear winter".
Along with digitalization, the development of the Internet and classic computers, there are completely new breakthroughs. With the breakthrough in the field of electrical neural networks, Marvin Minsky is thinking about the problem of "learning" machines. After the works of Noam Chomsky in the field of language, the problem of machine translation of (Russian) language opens, and with it the whole spectrum of tasks of recognizing words, faces and patterns. Successes in training artificial neural networks with propagation and feedback, as well as the development of phase logic and expert systems, are step by step reviving the field of artificial intelligence.
Various AI techniques are starting to be used where it was least expected - in the video game industry, and then they are slowly conquering the internet, film, social networks. Eventually, robots begin to conquer the human world as well. Robots that are sometimes even in conflict with each other now drive your Facebook profile, manage street surveillance and financial transactions.
I didn't know the German artist was ..interesting