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What if a robot could write the archives of tomorrow? Let us introduce you to Bond.
Let's imagine for a moment that we are between the 16th and 17th centuries, and it is more than useful to be able to identify people in a reliable way. The civil status clerks are established thanks to the Edict of Louis XIV in October 1691, and the long work of writing and managing archives only increases. This is a (very) long-term job, needless to say, but above all, it is a rich heritage for all of our history.What if robots had added their touch?
"just Bond" is not a pale copy of the well-known English spy, it's a rather particular robot.
If the first typewriters, before computers, revolutionized the data entry work of millions of acts, handwriting remains the majority. It is also common to find carefully crafted, ordered, even artistic handwriting, as well as much less conscientious handwriting, which is therefore much harder to transcribe. Bond, in addition to speaking, it also writes, with a real pencil and on real paper. "This robot holds a pencil and writes like you" explains the founding president of the company that "employs" Bond. Currently, it is possible to pay Bond to write for us all kinds of messages, it is capable of copying our handwriting and even adding imperfections... More real than real?
A Back to the Future perspective allows us to imagine the extraordinary time savings that such robots could have saved for the clerks of yesteryear. In 2014, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin presented a robot capable of reproducing two 80m-long Torah scrolls by writing for nearly 10 hours a day at the same speed as its human 'counterpart'. If the robot does not write faster, it writes for much longer and in a consistent manner, whereas the clerk may sometimes show signs of fatigue.
We are in the midst of a robotic revolution. And if the robot-writer would certainly have saved valuable time for the clerks, it could also have saved us time in our transcriptions through automatic, systematic, standardized writing, with or without imperfections. So what connections could be possible between robots and genealogy? The robot is at the heart of scientific work, created by Man, it is therefore a bit human itself, sometimes idealized. Could we in the near future include robots in our genealogy? A robotic cousin/twin, at the service of Man or even the world? A robot paleographer, in any case, that would be quite useful!