Something worries humanoid robot makers: robots suck

Sean McLain of the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday on the recent Humanoid Summit in Mountain View, California, held earlier this month. McLain seems to have gotten the impression that robot makers are worried they’ve oversold a technology that, well, sucks. So far anyway.

Of course, Elon Musk promises an army of robotsand there is now some sort of robot butler pre-ordered by rich people who are supposed to paying $20,000 basically just to help train him. What the optimists may not have taken into account is something that The Chinese government has already ruled on: There is a risk that if this hype produces actual retail products, the creators of those products are poised to create millions of dissatisfied customers and will have accomplished nothing other than filling landfills with mountains of human-shaped e-waste.

Cautious robot executive Kaan Dogrusoz, CEO of Weave Robotics, told the Journal: “There’s a lot of great technology work going on, a lot of great talent working on it, but it’s not well-defined products yet.” » Next, Dogrusoz discussed a piece of consumer technology history that should inspire robot optimists to rethink their lives: “Complete bipedal humanoids are the Newtons of our time,” Dogrusoz told the Journal.

The Apple Newton MessagePad was a portable computer released in the mid-1990s, at a time when Steve Jobs was not in control of the company. It was a buggy and it became a huge public joke. When Steve Jobs regained control of Apple, he ended it. As Wired wrote in 2013“The Newton was not only killed, he was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by his hair, and beaten to death in his youth by one of the great men of technology.”

Releasing a bunch of worthless Newton-level bipedal robots into the world is a possibility that should worry tech company CEOs. A good metaphor for such a corporate disaster might be that of a person teleoperating a humanoid robot in such a way that it kicks its operator in the groin. If only there was a freshly viral video in my feeds that could help illustrate this…

Here are some other quotes chosen by the Journal during the summit:

McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar told the Journal that when a company spends $100 deploying a robot in a workplace, $20 goes to the robot and the remaining $80 goes to prevent the robot from hurting people. “We’re making a big extrapolation from watching videos of robots doing laundry to having a butler in my house who can do it all,” Kelkar warned in the Journal article.

Isaac Qureshi, CEO of a company called Gatlin Robotics, whose flagship product at the Summit was capable of cleaning a brick wall if teleoperated by a person wearing a VR headset, said: “Slowly, we will teach the Gatlin robot more things, like first dusting, cleaning surfaces, trash cans and then toilets. »

Pras Velagapudi, CTO of Agility Robotics, said: “We tried to figure out how to create not just a humanoid robot, but also a humanoid robot that does useful work. “He might be on to something.

The leaders of Robots spoke. Don’t buy a humanoid robot, people. It may not do anything useful for you, but it may hit you in the groin.