Roboty protestują w Warszawie. A ja chcę jednego do prania

When I read the story about robots demonstrating outside Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs in Warsaw, my first reaction was something like: wait, what?

Robots protesting against robots?

All right. I had to look.

It turned out that around thirty robots — humanoid and quadruped — had lined up outside the ministry with Polish flags and slogans calling for regulation of artificial intelligence and robotisation. Behind the action was a newly created initiative called Democratism, connected with Opole-based Delta Robots. Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski even came outside to meet and speak with the demonstrators.

And then I started searching. Who are these people? Why is a company involved in robots organising a demonstration warning about robotisation? Is this politics? Marketing? Genuine concern? All at once?

The answer is probably: yes.

Grzegorz Kuliś, associated with Delta Robots and recruitment company Weegree, openly acknowledged that the campaign also had PR value. I rather like that. There is little point pretending that thirty robots marching outside a government ministry accidentally look good on television. At the same time, the organisers' argument is quite serious: technology is developing faster than the rules under which we are supposed to live with it.

And that made my mind take a bigger jump. To Lech Wałęsa. To his famous leap over the wall of the Gdańsk Shipyard in August 1980. To Solidarity. To the moment when a few people saying “no” to the system began something that later helped change the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.

I am obviously not comparing thirty robots with Solidarity. Not yet. But the association came naturally.

Perhaps because when I think about my Polish friends and family in Poland, I always see something deeply humanistic in the country. People like to talk. Argue. Take things apart. Look for the story underneath the story. Sometimes for considerably too long.

And perhaps that is why a robot demonstration in Warsaw seems more Polish to me than it should.

Poland has a very old tradition of political debate and of believing that power should listen. From Nihil novi in 1505 onward, kings could not simply introduce new laws without the participation of the nobility represented in parliament. Later, the idea of “Golden Liberty” sometimes went spectacularly too far — liberum veto could paralyse the state — but the need for argument and dissent ran deep.

Around the same broad period, the Netherlands developed something else: an unusually open world of printing and publishing for early-modern Europe. It was not modern freedom of the press — censorship still existed — but printers and writers in the Dutch Republic had considerably more room than in many neighbouring countries.

Two different roads. Speaking. Printing. Debating. Four or five hundred years later, those are still the things that may determine whether technology serves people or people serve technology.

This is slightly personal for me because I am a software developer. I try to sell language-learning apps. I even have one for Polish, built around a fairly simple idea: start speaking from the first minute. Then add more. Vocabulary. Listening. Reading. Writing. Pronunciation.

And to recognise speech, I use technology from Apple and OpenAI Whisper. So I am exactly one of those people building things with AI — and then sitting down to read articles arguing that AI needs regulation. A reasonably honest problem.

Poland does not currently look like a country where robots have already taken everybody's jobs. Registered unemployment was 5.8% in August, while on Eurostat's harmonised measure Poland remained among the EU countries with the lowest unemployment, around 3.4%.

But that is precisely Democratism's point. Not what happened yesterday. What may happen tomorrow. Their website tells the history of automation from machines replacing physical strength, through industrial robots and office software, to AI and humanoid machines. Their argument is simple: it is better to establish rules before the change becomes irreversible.

Hard to argue with that. Much easier to argue about what those rules should actually be. And that is exactly why the Democratism idea is interesting. The demonstration was impressive, Delta Robots looks like an interesting company, and thirty robots carrying Polish flags is obviously also very good marketing for a company that sells and rents robots. But that does not make the question disappear. Quite the opposite.

The only real danger may be that the promotional angle is slightly too visible. People have a remarkable instinct for cynicism when they suspect a hidden motive, and here the motive is not particularly well hidden: a robotics company is organising a debate about robots. I understand the scepticism. But the question remains valid even when the sponsor's logo is standing next to it. Who is responsible for people whose jobs disappear? Who pays for retraining? How quickly should companies be allowed to replace people with machines? Who is responsible when a machine makes a mistake? And when is the right time to make the rules — afterwards, or before?

I am in favour of the debate. But I am also very much in favour of robots. Personally, I am waiting for the day when one of them moves into my house. I do not need an android capable of philosophical conversation. My requirements are simpler: laundry. All of it. Into the machine, out again, drying, sorting, folding and — very important — putting everything into the correct drawers, without leaving a pile “to fold later” on a chair for four days. Then I will truly believe in the robotics revolution.

And if the robot can also make me a sandwich while I sit at my computer writing things like this, I will not protest either. Quite the opposite. It will give me more time for the intellectual process. Or at least more time to pretend that is what I am doing.