· culture
Mechanical Shadows: The Impact of 80s and 90s Robots on Today's AI Culture
From R2-D2’s resourceful chirps to Data’s quiet quest for personhood, robots of the 1980s and 1990s shaped how we imagine and interact with artificial intelligence today. This essay traces the archetypes, design cues, ethical debates and research questions those mechanical characters cast forward - and how their mechanical shadows still inform modern robotics, AI policy and popular expectations.