Robot butlers look more like Roombas than Rosey from the Jetsons
The robots in my building are multiplying. It started with a device about the size of a doghouse that cleans floors, but not very well – a commercial-grade Roomba that talks to you if you get in its way. Somehow I'm always in his way.
My landlord was clearly excited about the new engineering marvel of an addition to the building, which is half the size of a New York city block. There are a lot of floors to clean and man hours to save. Then my landlord told me that the robot, previously limited to the lobby, could now connect wirelessly to the elevator and control it. The robot now travels up and down throughout the day, exiting the elevator to clean the hallway of each floor. The rental company was happy with this new complexity and sourced two additional, larger robots to complete the fleet. In the spring, he told me with a serious face, drones would come to clean windows. I expect to see them once Daylight Saving Time begins.
If you believe the press releases, we'll soon be seeing more robots everywhere—and not just doghouse-sized Roombas. Humanoid robots are on track to be a $200 billion industry by 2035 “under the most optimistic scenarios.” a new report from Barclays Research. The cost of the hardware needed to give robots powerful arms and legs has fallen sharply over the past decade, and the AI boom is giving investors hope that powerful brains will soon follow. That's why you're now hearing about consumer-grade humanoids the 1X Neo And the figure 03which are designed as robot butlers.
However, the bigger picture of what humanoids can do is more complicated. As James Vincent explained last month in Harper's Magazinethe promises that robotics startups make often don't match the reality of the technology. I learned this firsthand while working on my own feature on embodied AI, which recently took me to several labs at MIT. (Stay tuned in the coming weeks.)
One of the robots I saw there was the 1.20 meter tall Unitree G1, which can dance and do backflips. It's like a mini-Atlas, the humanoid robot built by Boston Dynamics You've probably seen it on YouTubebut made in China at a fraction of the price. Will Knight recently profiled Unitree for Wired and argued that China, not the United States, was poised to lead the robot revolution because of its cheap hardware and ability to develop new designs. However, a dancing robot is not necessarily intelligent.
The geopolitical puzzle pieces
If you've never heard of a “thing biography,” you've probably come across one of the books. Purple: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World by Simon Garfield is sometimes considered an accidental original example of the genre. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World is the book that brought it to my attention when it became a bestseller almost 30 years ago. You can now read thing biographies, also called micro-stories, about them Bananas, Wood, Rope – Actually, every thing you might find on a shelf in an airport bookstore has a fascinating story. (Slate Decoder ring Podcast has a great episode that explains the phenomenon.)
What makes these books particularly entertaining is that they don't deal at all with the things themselves. It's about us. The story of the cod is all about what the fish tells us about exploration and human ingenuity. One of my favorites from the genre is The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Changed Civilization. Almost 300 pages are about sand, which actually makes everything important, from concrete to microchips. And we're running out.
AI is inherently physical as it requires hardware to exist. And I'm not just talking about the actuators, motors and sensors that make machines move. The powerful Nvidia chips that promise to provide the processing power needed to give stupid backflipping robots a brain that can turn them into general-purpose devices? They are made of sand. It's really good sand, of course – sand that has been cleaned and processed in some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities humanity has ever built. But as the conversation about advanced hardware powered by even more advanced software changes our relationship with technology, I find it profound to know that we're dealing with familiar ingredients.
If you think sitting around reading books about sand is too escapist, let me offer you a compromise. For a dose of reality, take a look Chip War: The Battle for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. It's also about sand, but specifically about the history of semiconductors in the United States and the arms race with China that it ultimately triggered. As the Trump administration We are only a few centimeters closer to trying to conquer GreenlandMany fear that China's leader Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan and take control of its advanced chip manufacturing facilities. If China cuts off Taiwan, which produces 90 percent of the advanced chips needed for AI applications, the digital economy would grind to a halt. according to my Vox colleague Joshua Keating. China wouldn't just lead the robot revolution. It would own it.
I estimate the robots in my building weigh about 120 pounds each. That's an educated guess because I had to pick it up to get it out of my way. If you move too fast or intimidate them too much – not that I did that on purpose – they freeze. As a safety feature, this is great. But the other day I got on the elevator, scared a robot and the elevator didn't move. I took the stairs.
In some ways, however, these errors are essential. Every few weeks I see a technician come and work on the robots. Maybe they replace a part, update the software, or just give a pep talk. It's a reminder that moving toward a future in which embodied AI, likely robots, helps us unlock humanity's greatest potential is a process, and likely a long one.
Many people credit Elon Musk with starting the race to develop a general-purpose humanoid with his announcement Tesla's efforts to do this back in 2021. Since then, Musk has demonstrated various prototypes of the Tesla humanoid Optimus. Many of them are just puppets operated by employees behind the scenes. This week, Musk admitted that making the humanoids “painfully slow” before it hopefully sped up. I'm really wondering, what's the rush?
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