The 9 Taboos of Robotics:
Why We Need an "AI Act" for Hardware

Robots are officially sold to "assist," "augment," and "fill shortages." But behind the polished press releases lies a starker reality. We discuss technology, but we avoid the structural upheavals it brings.

Just as the GDPR forced a reckoning with data privacy and the AI Act is addressing algorithmic bias, the hardware world faces a crisis of silence. From the economic reality of ROI to the military origins of "civilian" drones, here are the taboos the industry is hesitant to voice.

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The Economic & Human Reality Check

The first layer of silence covers the tangible impact on the factory floor and the balance sheet. While we celebrate POCs (Proofs of Concept), the long-term data tells a different story.

Three major economic taboos are consistently ignored:

• The True Replacement: Contrary to the "augmentation" narrative, the ultimate goal is often net replacement. Intermediate roles disappear, and the combined effect of Robotics + AI + Optimization creates a definitive labor shift that governments are afraid to address.
• The ROI Mirage: Everyone promises efficiency, but few publish post-deployment audits. High maintenance costs, integration failures, and vendor lock-in mean many robots never truly pay for themselves before becoming obsolete.
• The Reliability Gap: Computer vision is fragile. Outside the controlled lighting of a lab, robots struggle with dust, unpredictable humans, and unstructured chaos. This "perception gap" is the industry's dirty secret.

Ethics, Control, and the "Black Box"

Beyond money, we face existential questions. Much like the GDPR gave users rights over their data, we lack a framework for the physical autonomy of machines.

• The Military-Civil Blur: Most "civilian" innovations (quadrupeds, drones, navigation) have military roots. The technology is dual-use by design, creating a gray zone where surveillance and consumer tech overlap.
• The Affective Trap: We underestimate the psychological impact. Humans project emotions onto machines (the "ELIZA effect"). Manufacturers encourage this "bond" to sell units, ignoring the risks of social isolation and emotional manipulation.
• The Missing "Kill Switch": Who truly controls the robot? With cloud dependencies and remote updates, users don't fully own their hardware. This loss of technological sovereignty is a major blind spot in current regulations.

The Governance Void

We are building machines faster than we are building the laws to govern them. The "Ultimate Taboo" is that we don't know where to stop. Without a collective vision, we are letting technical capability dictate social reality.

Robotics is less a technological problem than a political one. It requires the same rigorous scrutiny we applied to personal data with GDPR and to algorithms with the AI Act.

"The silence surrounding these taboos serves only one purpose: to delay the necessary regulation of physical AI."