Boston Dynamics’ latest — deliberately creepy? — humanoid robot has me rethinking my smart home robot dreams.
As a child of the 1980s, my perception of the smart home has been dominated by the idea that one day, we will all have Rosey the Robot-style robots roaming our homes — dusting the mantelpiece, preparing dinner, and unloading the dishwasher. (That last one is a must; we were smart enough to come up with a robot to wash our dishes; can’t we please come up with one that can also unload them?)
However, after seeing Boston Dynamics’ latest droid, Atlas, unveiled this week, my childhood dreams are fast turning into a smart home nightmare. While The Jetsons’ robot housekeeper had a steely charm, accentuated by its frilly apron, the closer we come to having humanoid robots in our home, the more terrifying it appears they will be. Not so much because of how they look — I could see Atlas in an apron — but more because of what they represent.
With its bipedal, hardcore yogi moves, Atlas is a new all-electric humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics. And while the next generation of the company’s Atlas program is designed for commercial use, they tout it as being capable of doing work that’s “too dangerous, too hard, or too dull and dirty” for us humans. Three of those things definitely apply to the home.
While Atlas seems intentionally designed to feel menacing — or at least far from cuddly — the technology on show here makes it easy to connect the dots to the creation of a humanoid home robot. Nvidia is working on that very thing, recently announcing the launch of Project GR00T Foundation model for humanoid robots. “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said of the launch. “The enabling technologies are coming together for leading roboticists around the world to take giant leaps towards artificial general robotics.”
As a child of the aforementioned ’80s, artificially intelligent robots are the stuff of nightmares. The Terminator series embedded the fear of the robot uprising in the psyche of my generation, and things haven’t gotten much cheerier since.