Sean McLain of the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday about the recent Humanoids conference in Mountain View, California that was held earlier this month. McLain seems to have come up with the picture that robotics makers are worried that they have oversold copper-consuming technology. Until now.
Sure, Elon Musk is promising an army of robots, and now there’s a kind of robot bulb pre-ordered by rich people who are expected to pay $20,000 just to help train it. What the optimists may not have considered is something that the Chinese government has already talked about: there is a risk that if this conference produces real products for sale, the creators of those products are about to make millions of unsatisfied customers, and they will have no choice but to fill landfills with mountains of human-shaped e-waste.
Another watchful robotics executive Kaan Dogrusoz, CEO of Weave Robotics, told the Journal, “There’s a lot of technical work being done, there’s a lot of talent working on this, but they’re not very specific about the products.” Dogrusoz then asked for a piece of consumer technology history that should have robots that hope to rethink their lives: “Bipedal humanoids are full of Newtons of our times,” Dogrusoz told the Journal.
The Apple Newton MessagePad was a portable computer product that was marketed in the mid-90s when Steve Jobs was not in control of the company. It was buggy, and it became a huge social joke. When Steve Jobs took control of Apple again, he quit. As Wired wrote in 2013, “Newton wasn’t just murdered, he was brutally murdered, dragged into a closet by his hair and kicked to death in his youth by one of the great men of technology.”
Unleashing a bunch of useless Newton-level bipedal robot duds on the world is a possibility that should have the CEO of a tech company worried. A good metaphor for such a business disaster would be a robot operator who is so human that it delivers a kick in the groin to its operator. If only there was a newborn video in my feed that could help show this…
Here are some excerpts selected by the Journal that presented at the conference:
Ani Kelkar, a McKinsey partner told the Journal that if a company spends $100 on installing robots in the workplace, $20 goes to the robot, and the other $80 goes to preventing the robot from harming people. “We’re making a big surprise from watching videos of robots doing laundry to cleaning my house that can do everything,” Kelkar warned in the Journal article.
Isaac Qureshi, the CEO of a company called Gatlin Robotics, whose flagship product at the Summit was able to scrape a brick wall when telephonically operated by a person using a VR headset said, “Little by little, we will teach the Gatlin robot many things, such as first to remove dust, clean the area, trash cans and then have a toilet.”
Pras Velagapudi, CTO of Agility Robotics said, “We were trying to figure out how to not only make a humanoid robot, but also make a humanoid robot that does a useful job.” He might be on to something.
Robotics officials have spoken. Do not buy a human robot, my people. It won’t do you any good, but it can clog your groin.
