By KIM BELLARD
When I was young, robots were Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet etc.), the unnamed robot in Lost in space, or The Jetsons‘ Rosey the robot. The Generation But Generation Z is probably thinking of Boston Dynamics’ running, jumping, backward-flipping Atlas, whose videos have entertained millions.
Unfortunately, Boston Dynamics announced last week that Atlas is being discontinued. “For nearly a decade, Atlas has captured our imaginations, inspired the next generation of roboticists and overcome technical hurdles in the field,” the company said. “Now it’s time for our hydraulic Atlas robot to sit back and relax.”
The most important part of this announcement was the description of Atlas as “hydraulic,” because the very next day Boston Dynamics announced a new, all-electric Atlas: “Our new electric Atlas platform is here.” Backed by decades of visionary robotics innovation and years of With hands-on experience, Boston Dynamics is mastering the next commercial frontier.” Additionally, the company boasts, “The electric version of Atlas will be stronger and offer a greater range of motion than any of our previous generations.”
The introductory video is amazing:
Boston Dynamics says: “Atlas may resemble a human form factor, but we are equipping the robot to move as efficiently as possible to complete a task, rather than being limited by a human’s range of motion.” Atlas will focus on move in ways that exceed human capabilities.”
You’re right.
CEO Robert Playter told Evan Ackerman about it IEEE Spectrum: “We will bring it to market as a product, targeting industrial applications, logistics and locations that are much more diverse than where you see stretch – heavy objects with complex geometry, probably in manufacturing environments.”
He continued:
This is our third product [following Spot and Stretch], and one of the things we learned is that it takes a lot more than just interesting technology to make a product work. You have to have a real use case, and you have to have real productivity around the use case that a customer cares about. Everyone will buy one Robots – that’s what we learned at Spot. But they don’t start by buying fleets, and you don’t have a business until you can sell multiple robots to the same customer. And you can’t get there without all those other things – the reliability, the service, the integration.
The company will work with Hyundai (ICYMI owns Boston Dynamics). Mr Playter says Hyundai is “really excited about this venture; They want to transform their manufacturing and see Atlas as a big part of that, and so we will start doing that soon.”
The company also announced Orbit™, software “that provides a centralized platform to manage your entire robot fleet, site maps and digital transformation data.” It said: “With a strong team of ML experts building our products, we are ready to bring impactful AI to market immediately – we have already started with Spot, and with Atlas it will be even better and faster.”
Speaking of AI, perhaps lost in the Atlas hype: Mantee Robotics last week emerged from two years of stealth mode and announced MenteeBot, which the company described as “an end-to-end humanoid robot with sufficient dexterity for a wide range of activities in both households.” as well as in industrial warehouses.” By “end-to-end” they mean AI-controlled.
The company expects a household version and a storage version, with a prototype expected in Q1 2025.
And of course, there are numerous other companies fighting to bring humanoid (and other) robots into our lives, including Agility Robotics, Figure, NVIDIA and, in his spare time, Tesla. In one way or another, get ready for robots in our lives and workplaces – if they aren’t here yet.
New research confirms that robots make workers less happy, even if they don’t take your job. “Our most important finding is that robots impair the meaningfulness and autonomy of work,” say the authors. The key to mitigation is giving workers control of the robots, which of course contradicts them being AI-controlled. Expect some unhappy workers.
An interesting perspective comes from Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing in The edge: Maybe I don’t want Rosey the robot after all.
“The question,” she says, “is, should we work toward an all-powerful, bipedal, human-like bot that can do everyday tasks for us? The more I think about it – and the more robots there are running around my house – the more I think the answer is no. We don’t need a robot that understands what we say and can mimic our movements; We need robots that do one job (or perhaps two related jobs) and do them well.”
She emphasizes, “If my self-draining dishwasher breaks, I can responsibly recycle it and get a new one.” When my humanoid robot housekeeper reaches the end of its firmware updates, I will have to put it out to pasture.” She fears that “ brings with it a whole range of complicated challenges surrounding the nature of consciousness and the limits of humanity.”
That kind of puts the “retirement” of the original Atlas into a different perspective, doesn’t it?
If we want all these robots to live with us, we should be more careful about how we socialize them. A new article argues that it is people, not programming, that make robots social.
“If we want to understand what makes a robot social, we need to look at the broader range of communities around robots and how people interact with each other,” said Malte Jung, co-author and associate professor at Cornell University. “It’s not just about programming a better character for the robot, making it respond better to human social characteristics, making it look cuter or behave more naturally.”
Remember: We have reached the point where we need to think about the socialization of robots.
AI is entering our lives faster than we realize and in ways we don’t yet realize the impact this will have, and this will happen with robots too. Whether we are ready or not.
Kim is a former e-marketing manager at a major blues plan, editor of the defunct and lamented magazine Tincture.io, and now a regular THCB contributor