The Futility of Utility [in robotics]

A Thought Experiment on Robotics, Purpose, Utility, and Our Place in the Wild

Aug 11, 2025

Imagine a peculiar assignment: to dispatch a robot on a one-way, time-traveling mission to a wild forest, flourishing in an era long before Homo sapiens walked the Earth. A critical condition is set: this robot, once sent, will never be retrieved. Neither its creators nor any other human will ever see it or its findings again. This scenario, seemingly simple, acts as a profound philosophical probe, compelling us to confront our deep-seated assumptions about function, utility, and our relationship with both technology and the natural world. What, indeed, could be the "function" of such an entity in a world untouched by human needs and unobserved by human eyes?

Four Whispers from the Wilderness: Reimagining the Robot's "Role"

The very notion of sending a robot—a quintessential tool of modern technology—without a clear, human-centric purpose feels counterintuitive. Yet, the constraints of this thought experiment force a creative departure from conventional utility. I have been playing with this thought experiment for a while, asking friends and family what they would imagine the function of the robot should be. Here are four potential "functions" or roles such a robot might embody that I keep hearing:

The Silent Witness/Archivist: Its primary role could be to meticulously observe and record the primordial environment, creating an exhaustive archive of a lost world. Even if never accessed by humans, its existence becomes a testament to the intrinsic value of that ancient reality, a cosmic message in a bottle affirming "this was here." The function is not for our direct benefit, but an act of acknowledging existence itself.
The Catalyst of Unforeseen Change: Through its mere presence—perhaps the slow degradation of its exotic materials or its programmed, yet ultimately aimless, movements—the robot could subtly alter its surroundings. It becomes an unintentional agent in the deep-time evolutionary narrative, its "function" being to introduce a novel, albeit minuscule, variable into the Earth's ancient ecological equations. The robot might carry abstract patterns, complex chemical compounds, or even basic building blocks capable of interacting with the environment over geological timescales. Its "function" would be a long-term, speculative seeding, potentially nudging local evolutionary pathways or creating conditions for a form of organization entirely alien to what we know.
The Aesthetic Object/Land Art: Designed not for a task but as an object of profound beauty or intrigue, its function could be purely aesthetic. It exists as a piece of land art for an audience of none, a strange, silent sculpture in the wilderness. This extends the idea of art for art's sake to technology, valuing form and presence over performative action.
The Embodiment of a Question: Perhaps the robot's true function is entirely for its creators—a philosophical act. Sending it into the untamed past becomes a symbolic gesture, a monument to humanity's own search for meaning, our curiosity about origins, and our complex relationship with the universe. The robot itself performs no "task" in the forest that benefits us, but its journey embodies our deepest inquiries.

These conceptions move beyond simple utility, suggesting roles that are existential, aesthetic, or symbolic. The "no retrieval" clause is pivotal; if a robot's function is tied to reporting back, that purpose is instantly nullified. Similarly, the pre-human setting removes any possibility of serving a human-like intelligence or societal structure, forcing a re-evaluation of what "function" can mean when detached from direct human benefit or observation.

The Utility Goggles: Why We Insist on Function

Our modern world is saturated with objects and technologies meticulously designed for specific utilities. From the smartphones in our pockets to the infrastructure of our cities, everything is intended to do something, to serve a purpose, to be useful. This constant immersion conditions a mental reflex: when confronted with an object, especially a complex technological one like a robot, we instinctively seek its function. The phrase "sending a robot to a wild forest” immediately triggers this usual mental path.

However, the wild forest of the experiment—a world existing before human industry, agriculture, or even human consciousness—operates on different principles. In such a realm, no object or living being necessarily has a specific utility or function in the instrumental, human-centric sense we understand it. Elements within an ecosystem possess roles, they interact and contribute to the system's dynamics, but they do not have a utility designed by or for an external agent in the way a hammer has utility for a carpenter. Our insistence on assigning function can be seen as a way of imposing a familiar order and meaning onto the unknown, a cognitive tool for making the world comprehensible and, often, controllable. The primordial forest, devoid of human context, resists this imposition, thereby revealing the constructed, and often projected, nature of our utilitarian worldview.

A Brief History of "Useful": From Ancient Ideals to Industrial Imperatives

The human preoccupation with utility and function is not a recent phenomenon, but its character has evolved significantly.

Philosophically, the concept of utility was already part of ancient Greek thinkers. Aristotle spoke of "telos," an inherent purpose or end towards which things strive.¹ Epicurus and later the Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good with pleasure or happiness, arguing that actions are right if they tend to promote overall well-being.³ Bentham, a key figure, proposed a "hedonic calculus" to measure pleasure and pain, viewing these as the primary motivators of human action and the basis for a normative criterion of action.⁴ Over time, particularly within economics, this broad psycho-philosophical notion of utility was progressively narrowed. Economists like Jevons played a role in transforming utility into a quantifiable number representing preference, a "bare construct" compared to its richer antecedents.⁶

Culturally, the balance between function and other values like aesthetics has varied. For instance, ancient Chinese and Japanese room dividers masterfully combined practical needs—controlling drafts, creating privacy—with artistic expression, embedding cultural narratives into functional objects. When these screens were introduced to Europe, their cultural and practical contexts were often stripped away, with Western societies focusing more on their aesthetic appeal as symbols of taste and sophistication.⁷ This illustrates how "function" is not a fixed property but can be interpreted, valued, and re-contextualized across cultures, though dominant forces can also decontextualize objects in favor of narrower interpretations of utility.

The Industrial Revolution dramatically amplified the societal focus on utility and functional efficiency. The rise of public utilities like municipal water systems, gas, and electricity was foundational to industrialization and urban growth, demonstrating utility on a collective scale.⁸ This era spurred new economic theories and the growth of consumerism, where the utility, accessibility, and affordability of mass-produced goods became paramount.⁹ Utilitarian philosophy itself influenced significant social reforms during this period, providing a rationale for labor laws, public health initiatives, and educational access aimed at improving societal welfare and achieving the "greatest good for the greatest number".¹⁰ However, this period also saw utilitarian ideas potentially breeding "extreme egoism and money worship," contributing to moral anomie as traditional social structures were disrupted.¹³ Even reformist movements like Fabian socialism, while admiring Bentham's practical reformist spirit, critiqued classical utilitarianism for its individualism, seeking to adapt its principles towards collectivist ideals and community service.¹⁴

Adding another layer, Max Weber's analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that certain Protestant beliefs, particularly Calvinism, cultivated a work ethic that emphasized diligence, efficiency, and a sense of "calling" in one's profession.¹⁵ This "innerworldly asceticism," focused on methodical labor and the reinvestment of wealth rather than its idle enjoyment, inadvertently provided a powerful cultural and psychological engine for capitalist development. Work became a moral obligation, and its proficient, rational execution a sign of virtue, deeply ingraining a utilitarian mindset where economic success and productivity became ends in themselves, often detached from their original religious underpinnings.¹⁶

This historical trajectory reveals a progressive instrumentalization and, in many spheres, a narrowing of the concept of utility. What began as a broad philosophical inquiry into human flourishing and the good life became increasingly tethered to economic efficiency, measurable output, and practical problem-solving, especially in the wake of industrialization and the rise of capitalism. This has shaped a dominant cultural lens through which value is often equated with demonstrable usefulness.

The Limits of Function: Utility, Complexity, and the Wild

The attempt to impose our familiar notions of utility onto the wild, primordial forest of the thought experiment quickly runs into fundamental problems. Such complex, self-organizing systems do not operate according to human-designed functions or easily discernible, singular purposes.

Modern utility theory itself faces criticism for its limited scope and unrealistic assumptions when applied to complex realities. It often presumes perfectly rational actors, consistent preferences, and complete information—conditions rarely met in the real world, let alone a prehistoric ecosystem.¹⁷ Furthermore, measuring subjective utility is notoriously difficult, and the theory can overemphasize economic factors while neglecting social relationships, personal fulfillment, or environmental sustainability.¹⁷ Complexity science urges a move away from such reductionist frameworks, which, while useful during the Industrial Revolution for analyzing simpler, mechanical systems, are inadequate for understanding the interconnected, unpredictable, and emergent nature of contemporary challenges and complex systems like ecosystems.¹⁸ In complex systems, understanding the individual parts in isolation is insufficient to grasp the behavior of the whole, as new properties emerge from the interactions among components.

Alternative conceptual lenses offer more fitting ways to consider systems like the wild forest. While traditional teleology, such as Aristotle's concept of "telos," posits an inherent purpose in things ¹, the concept of emergence in complex systems suggests that functions and properties can arise spontaneously from the interactions of components, without being pre-programmed or reducible to those individual parts.¹ The flocking behavior of birds, for instance, serves the "purpose" of predator avoidance and foraging efficiency, yet this purpose is an emergent property of the collective, not a designed function of any single bird.¹ This challenges purely mechanistic views that deny any form of purpose in nature, suggesting instead that purpose can be an intrinsic, emergent feature of complex organization.²

The theory of autopoiesis, developed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, provides another crucial perspective. It describes living systems as being primarily defined by their capacity for self-production, self-maintenance, and continuous self-renewal through interaction with their environment, all while maintaining their distinct organization and identity.¹⁹ An autopoietic system's primary "drive" is its own continuation. This contrasts sharply with an "allopoietic" system, like a machine (or our robot), which is designed and built by an external agent to produce something other than itself or to serve an external function.²⁰ The wild forest is a quintessential autopoietic system, a vast network of molecular exchanges and organismic interactions constantly renewing itself.

Applying a purely utilitarian, functionalist lens, born from our experience with allopoietic tools, to an autopoietic, complex, wild system is like trying to understand a living organism solely by cataloging the tools it could be fashioned into after its death. It misses the essence of its being. The central tension of the thought experiment lies in this very mismatch: an allopoietic object (the robot) is placed into an autopoietic system (the forest) under conditions where its designed, external purpose (for its human creators) is rendered void by the lack of retrieval. The question then shifts from "What can it do for us?" to "What does its presence mean, if anything, within a system that defines its own meaning and perpetuates its own existence?" Our standard intellectual toolkit for understanding purpose, rooted in utility theory and reductionism, falters in this scenario because the context lacks rational human actors, clear human preferences, and predictable, quantifiable outcomes tied to human benefit.

Our Planetary Echo: Society, Economy, and the Wild Forest Today

The robot-in-the-forest thought experiment is not merely an abstract philosophical puzzle; it serves as an allegory for how our contemporary society, driven by its economic systems, imposes a utilitarian worldview onto the natural environment. We treat the Earth and its ecosystems much like we are tempted to treat the robot: as something that must have a "function" beneficial to us.

The very concept of "ecosystem services" (ES), while often employed with good intentions in conservation efforts, illustrates this tendency. The ES framework attempts to quantify the benefits humans derive from nature—such as clean water, pollination, climate regulation—often in economic terms. However, it is frequently criticized for its inherent anthropocentrism, viewing nature primarily through the lens of its instrumental value to human society.²¹ Critics argue that this can inadvertently promote an exploitative human-nature relationship and lead to the commodification of nature, reducing its worth to a set of services that can be priced, traded, or substituted.²² While proponents suggest ES can reconnect society to its dependence on nature, the debate underscores the persistent tension between recognizing nature's intrinsic value (its right to exist for its own sake) and valuing it solely for its utility to humans.²²

This imposition of a utilitarian framework on nature is not new. Historically, Western philosophical and theological traditions have often justified human dominion over nature, positing that nature exists for human use and benefit. Aristotle, for example, suggested that plants exist for animals, and animals for humans.²³ Thinkers like Descartes reinforced the idea of human mastery over the natural world, and even Kant, while developing a sophisticated moral philosophy, regarded animals as mere means to human ends because they were not considered self-conscious or rational beings.²³ These long-standing ideas provided an intellectual and ethical scaffold for the instrumentalization of nature. The Industrial Revolution then provided the technological means and the capitalist economic system the motive (profit and growth) for exploiting natural "resources" on an unprecedented scale.

Today, this utilitarian mindset is evident in how we approach global environmental challenges. Discussions around climate change, for instance, often revolve around cost-benefit analyses of mitigation strategies and the "social cost of carbon," which attempts to measure climate damage in monetary terms.²⁴ While pragmatic, such approaches inherently prioritize human well-being (often in economic terms) and struggle to incorporate the well-being of non-human animals or the intrinsic value of ecosystems beyond their service provision.²⁴ The effort to assign economic value to nature's "services," while a strategic attempt to make nature "count" in prevailing decision-making frameworks, risks reinforcing the underlying assumption that nature is primarily valuable only insofar as it serves human purposes. The robot thought experiment, by revealing the potential absurdity of imposing function in a context devoid of human utility, serves as a critique of the limitations of relying solely on such an instrumental framing for our current ecological predicaments.

Data Lost to Time: The Unseen Knowledge of the Lone Robot

One of the starkest implications of the robot's irretrievability is the utter futility of any data collection it might undertake, at least from a human perspective. If the robot meticulously gathers information about the primordial forest—its flora, fauna, atmospheric conditions, geological formations—but this data is never seen, observed, or analyzed by any conscious entity capable of interpreting it, does it constitute knowledge? What is the value of information that remains forever locked within the robot's memory banks, lost to time?

This scenario challenges the technocratic impulse to "collect all the data," an idea often fueled by the belief that more information is inherently better. The thought experiment forces a crucial distinction: data, in itself, is not knowledge. It becomes information when organized and contextualized, and knowledge when understood, interpreted, and integrated by a cognitive agent. Without an observer, a recipient, or a processor, the robot's terabytes of meticulously recorded observations remain inert, like an unread library on a desolate planet. This highlights that the value of data is relational; it derives its significance from its potential to inform, to answer questions, to guide action, or to satisfy curiosity for some form of intelligence. The lone, unretrievable robot underscores that purpose and audience are critical to any knowledge-gathering endeavor, questioning the "data for data's sake" mentality. Its efforts, if geared towards research, would be a poignant exercise in unfulfilled potential, its "discoveries" echoing only within its own silent circuits.

Beyond the Machine in the Forest: Holons, Cognitive Gardens, and Relational Technology

The thought experiment, by pushing the logic of utilitarian, isolated technology to its extreme, paradoxically illuminates pathways toward a different technological ethos. This is where the mission and work of our organizations, Holon Labs Foundation and Holon Computing Corporation become particularly relevant.

Holon Labs Foundation and Holon Computing intent is to reimagine the function and potential of technology, with a focus on the preservation of knowledge, wisdom, intelligence and awareness in the context of the relationships of all living things.²⁵ Our mission includes crafting collective computing platforms that prioritize ecological integrity, social cohesion, and cultural continuity.²⁵ This vision explicitly moves beyond narrow, instrumental utility towards a more integrated and relational approach.

The term "holon," as explored in systems thinking, refers to an entity that is simultaneously a whole in itself and a part of a larger, encompassing whole.³⁰ A garden is an ecosystem, a network of interacting living components. A cognitive network of gardens, therefore, might imply the development of systems where technology and nature are interwoven as nested holons. In such a network, each component would possess its own integrity while contributing to the intelligence, resilience, and adaptive capacity of the larger, interconnected system. This vision is further enriched by considering the work of scholars like Peder Anker, who explores ecological design and even speculative ideas like "coding plants" to create living, functional architectures—a literal "living library".³³ Such approaches aim to move beyond seeing nature as a passive resource and technology as an external imposition, towards a co-evolutionary relationship.³⁵

The thought experiment of the lost robot serves Holon's agenda by starkly illustrating the limitations of the old paradigm.

By making conventional, utilitarian functions appear futile, it creates an opening to consider what else technology could be or do beyond simple instrumentalism.
It underscores the critical importance of context, relationship, and observation for technology to generate meaning or value, aligning perfectly with Holon's emphasis on "relationships of all living things" and "collective design".²⁵ The robot's isolation is the antithesis of Holon's interconnected vision.
It highlights the need for technologies that do not merely extract or impose, but rather integrate, preserve, and enrich—a goal central to Holon's stated mission. The robot, in its lonely vigil, becomes a symbol of "what not to do" if the aim is shared knowledge, ecological integrity, and symbiotic existence.

Holon's vision of collective computing platforms that prioritize ecological integrity offers a philosophical counterpoint to the isolated robot. It suggests technology in dialogue with living systems, rather than lost within them or acting upon them as a purely external force. The cognitive network of gardens that we are working to conceive can be understood as a guiding metaphor, or perhaps a literal objective, for creating such dialogic, holonic systems where meaning flows, components are in active relation, and function itself might be emergent, adaptive, and serving the well-being of the entire interconnected system. This conceptual shift mirrors the broader intellectual movement from reductionist thinking, which designs technology as an assembly of parts for a specific output, towards complexity and systems, which emphasizes interactions, emergence, and the holistic properties of networks.¹⁸ The robot in the primordial forest, a product of a more reductionist mindset, stranded by its lack of connection, implicitly validates the pursuit of a more relational, ecologically integrated technological future.

Wrapping up: From Isolated Tools to Integrated Ecologies

The thought experiment of sending an unretrievable robot to a pre-human forest serves as a powerful lens through which to examine our ingrained utilitarianism. It reveals how deeply our understanding of function is tied to human benefit, observation, and control. The primordial wilderness, an autopoietic system operating on principles far removed from human instrumentality, resists such simplistic impositions, forcing us to confront the constructed nature of our value systems.

The historical journey of "utility"—from broad philosophical concepts of flourishing to the narrower, efficiency-driven metrics of the industrial and post-industrial age—explains why it feels so natural to ask "what is it for?" yet so difficult to answer in this specific scenario. This ingrained perspective extends to our current relationship with the planet, where the language of "ecosystem services," while pragmatic, risks perpetuating an anthropocentric worldview that devalues nature's intrinsic worth.

The futility of the robot's unobserved data collection challenges us to consider the true purpose of knowledge and the limitations of a purely technocratic approach.

Ultimately, the thought experiment acts as a foil, highlighting the need for a new technological ethos—one that moves beyond isolated, extractive tools towards integrated, relational systems. The vision articulated by entities like Holon Labs, focusing on collective intelligence, ecological integrity, and the interconnectedness of all living things, points towards such a future. By pushing us to imagine technology outside the confines of immediate human utility, the robot lost in time helps us to better define what truly useful, meaningful, and sustainable technology might look like for our own era and for generations to come: not a solitary machine in a silent forest, but a vibrant node in a cognitive, ecological network.

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