Abstract Robots are ubiquitous in our daily tasks and, after many years of deployment in a variety of complex scenarios, they have started to develop their own cultural norms. Moreover, they are also exhibiting autogenous psychological traits. While these behaviours can be observed across robot communities, they remain foreign to us humans. In this paper, we present an initial set of experiments that provide insights into some of the cultural and psychological traits that are emerging in robot communities. Disclaimer: This paper is a work of fi ction, written in 2023 and describing research that will be carried out in 2043. For this reason, it includes citations to papers produced in the period 2024-2043, which have not been published (yet); all citations prior to 2024 refer instead to papers already in the literature. Any reference or resemblance to actual events or people or businesses, past, present or future, is entirely coincidental and the product of the authors’ imagination.