* From my window I can watch port traffic moving goods around when container ships are in. Six enormous orange cranes hoist and load the brightly coloured cargo containers. Smaller cranes in white on smaller rails shuttle at the footings of the orange giants, scuttling back and forth to yet smaller lifts that service the trucks which fill the viaduct in their diesel-belching ranks. All the activity around the industrial port is vehicular – everything is too big, too heavy for the unarmoured human form, so crushable among the machines. People are pilots and navigators, the executive function, the hand and the switch conducting expanded action, vast in speed and scope.

In the popular imagination our robots are anthropomorphic mecha or utilitarian factory armatures or androids (benign or malevolent) – all with neat forms and boundaries. We imagine them as we see ourselves – self-contained within an environment of measurable parameters. We look at robots as either autonomous or under the control of a unitary human or at most abstract, governed by determined heuristics.

In the world, it seems, things are more complicated. Take a slightly different perspective and the port itself becomes a robot, albeit one which incorporates multiple human inputs into its activity. The boundaries are not so clear but activities and functions are identifiable and can be mapped, the space is programmed, heuristics and policy algorithms are in place – the structure can be considered as a working unity. In the same way it is sometimes said that the first complex machine was the farm. Structural mechanisms of an industrial society mechanize support functions – we streamline and replace the necessary.