Something Is Making Humanoid Robot Makers Worry: The Robots Suck

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

Sure, Elon Musk is promising a robot army, and there’s now some kind of robot butler being preordered by rich people who are expected to pay $20,000 essentially just to help train it. What the optimists perhaps haven’t considered is something the Chinese government has already spoken on: there’s a danger that if this hype produces actual retail products, the creators of those products are on the verge of creating millions of unsatisfied customers, and will have accomplished nothing other than filling landfills with mountains of human-shaped e-waste.

One cautious robot executive Kaan Dogrusoz, CEO of Weave Robotics, told the Journal, “There’s a lot of great technological work happening, a lot of great talent working on these, but they are not yet well defined products.” Then Dogrusoz invoked a piece of consumer tech history that should have robot optimists rethinking their lives: “Full bipedal humanoids are the Newtons of our times,” Dogrusoz told the Journal.

The Apple Newton MessagePad was a portable computer product marketed in the mid-90s at a time when Steve Jobs didn’t control the company. It was buggy, and became a huge public joke. When Steve Jobs assumed control of Apple again, he discontinued it. As Wired wrote in 2013, “The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men.”

Releasing a bunch of worthless Newton-level bipedal robot duds into the world is a possibility that should have tech company CEOs worried. A good metaphor for such a corporate disaster might be someone teleoperating a humanoid robot such that it delivers a groin kick to its operator. If only there were a freshly viral video in my feeds that could help me illustrate this… 

Here are some other choice quotes the Journal took down at the summit:

Ani Kelkar, a McKinsey partner told the Journal that when a company spends $100 on robot deployment in a workplace, $20 goes to the robot, and the other $80 goes toward stopping the robot from injuring people. “We’re doing a big extrapolation from watching videos of robots doing laundry to a butler in my house that can do everything,” Kelkar warned in the Journal’s article.

Isaac Qureshi, the CEO of a company called Gatlin Robotics, whose flagship product at the Summit was able to scrub a brick wall if it was teleoperated by a person in a VR headset said, “Slowly, we’re going to teach the Gatlin robot more things, like starting with dusting, surface cleaning, trash bins and then the toilet.”

Pras Velagapudi, the CTO of Agility Robotics said, “We’ve been trying to figure out how do we not just make a humanoid robot, but also make a humanoid robot that does useful work.” He might be onto something.

Robot executives have spoken. Don’t buy a humanoid robot, folks. It cannot do anything useful for you, but it can clobber your groin.