The first symbiotic multispecies robot: Gakutensoku’s symbiotic cosmos
The first symbiotic multispecies robot: Gakutensoku’s symbiotic cosmos. History and Technology, 1–29 (2025).
In 1928, botanist environmentalist Nishimura Makoto created Gakutensoku, a humanoid robot at odds with the Euro-American conceptualisation of humanoid robots as machine slaves and the modern discourse of technology as civilisational departure from nature. Nishimura’s scientific observations of the connectivities between plants, animals, algae, and microorganisms shaped the design and semiotic of Gakutensoku in line with a worldview that everything in the universe is interconnected through mutual aid and symbiosis. I describe this epistemology as ‘multispecies symbiotic cosmos’ to capture the key ideas forming Gakutensoku’s multiracial, multigender, stateless design: symbiosis, mutual aid, symbiogenesis, transnational relations, and indigeneity. Gakutensoku challenged state discourse of progress and evolution through (technological) competition for survival justifying militarism, colonialism, and racism. In contrast with social Darwinism, it conveyed a symbiotic trajectory for technological progress that benefits the earth and future artificial humans. Gakutensoku is symptomatic of a larger context in which scientists against the state politics and Western modernity attempted to redefine the world through science. Gakutensoku thus offers a unique understanding of ‘humanoid robot’ and techno-human relations in the modern and contemporary robotics and the intellectual history of twentieth-century Japan, opening up the idea and narrative of humanoid robots and technology to new understandings and interpretations.
