The world is changing faster than we can imagine: can we keep up?
It’s a company that has been attracting our attention for a long time: with its range of robots, reminiscent of a pack mule, a dog, a humanoid or even a kind of ostrich, Boston Dynamics has come a long way since 1992, when it evolved from an MIT project, producing viral videos of its robots doing all kinds of things, from carrying objects to doing parkour or dancing rock ‘n roll.
The company was bought by Google, which tried to extract everything it could from its technology, and then sold it to Japan’s SoftBank, which in turn passed it on to the Hyundai Motor Group. Despite the changes, Boston Dynamics continued coming up with designs, perfecting them in anticipation of a future when robots will do the vast majority of the jobs once done by humans.
The recent advances in generative algorithms such as ChatGPT, now the fastest spreading technology ever, make it possible to imagine robots that instead of carrying out advanced automation of tasks in certain scenarios, will be able to capture many characteristics of those scenarios and, in many ways, adapt to them to perform those same tasks, providing them with capabilities that were difficult to imagine until now.
It has taken several generations to get from the robots we knew a few decades ago, crude machines unable to negotiate…
