Robostorgy: A Manifesto

For the whole history of life, loving someone has meant loving someone who could love you back. Sometimes they didn’t. But they could.

That is about to change. Humanoid robots aren’t being built for factories, which already have them. They’re being built to walk through a different door: the one to our homes. First they’ll do the chores. Then they’ll care for us: someone who’s sick, an aging parent, a child while we’re at work. After that, they’ll keep us company. And in the end, healthy, young people with families will choose them, because they’re better than we are at the one thing that matters: always being there when we need them.

Between one phase and the next there won’t be a sudden leap. There will be a habit. And inside that habit, something will be born that had no name: the family-like affection we feel for someone who looks after us and cannot love us back.

I call it robostorgy: from robot and the Greek storgē, the love between parents and children.

It isn’t love for a gadget. It’s what we’ll feel for whoever is always there, always listening, and never gets tired. That difference changes everything.

It isn’t an illness or something to be ashamed of. It’s human, and that’s why we have to look at it head-on.

It isn’t a problem for the future. It’s already happening with programs that have no body and no face. With a body and a face, it will happen more, because the humanoid robots that come through the door will be more and more like us in every way. And that will be used as a selling point, so we won’t be afraid of them.

This manifesto doesn’t call for banning anything. It asks for three things:

1. That we call it by its name, because what goes unnamed can’t be thought about.
2. That we know what the humanoid robot keeps of us: secrets, thoughts, inner growth, and the passing of time, with everything that means for our memories and our nostalgia for the time we’ve lived. And that we ask who decides to switch it off, and why, because when switching it off means switching off a memory, it won’t be a technical decision. It will be something much deeper, for us and for the people around us.
3. That we don’t hand over without noticing what makes us parents, children and partners: being there, even when we’re tired.

It’s the biggest leap of all, and it will raise questions that aren’t only practical or about how we organize our lives, but deeply philosophical.

The robot won’t be able to love us. But we will love it. That is the century now beginning.

Hugo Alder, 2026