Getting things done without limbs is underrated
Why Personal Assistants of the Future Won’t be Humanoid
…and what they’ll be instead
I’m an unabashed fan of Will Smith’s acting, and when I, Robot hit theaters in 2004, I watched it three times on opening weekend. (I was fifteen, sue me.)
Beyond the action, the sci-fi, and the trademark Will Smith quips, it was the robots that kept me coming back. I would even go so far as to say that I, Robot was the biggest single catalyst of my interest in futurism. I guess that’s somewhat appropriate, since it was based loosely on a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov, one of the godfathers of science fiction.
After watching the movie, I was honestly convinced that we’d have humanoid robots for personal assistants within my lifetime. (I was an impressionable teenager, and that’s probably an understatement.)
Actually, I wasn’t too far off.
There’s already a much bigger market for humanoid robots than most people realize. (For the record, android refers to robots that resemble males, and gynoid refers to robots that resemble females.)
Humanoids can run, jump, recognize faces, respond to verbal commands, and have conversations, just for starters.
Don’t get me wrong, in other words — humanoid robots are definitely going to be around, and possibly a huge part of our future. They may hold down service jobs, perform dangerous tasks so humans don’t need to, and provide companionship.
But they won’t be personal assistants.
Why you don’t need a robot butler
In I, Robot, “personal assistance” is exactly what most of the humanoids seem to be designed for. They cook, clean, carry things, walk dogs, and provide basic public service.
But we’re closing in on two decades since the film’s release, and we’ve done a lot of learning and innovating in that time — enough to know that it won’t be efficient to have humanoids doing those things in the future.
Instead, we have the internet of things (IoT), a vast network of devices small and large that are capable of receiving and transmitting information between one another.
You could think about it like this: the best humanoid robot of today can’t vacuum your floor any better than a Roomba (which, ironically, is made by a company called iRobot).
Even if you could buy a humanoid that was capable of cleaning, cooking, and walking your dogs, it would probably be unaffordable for the vast majority. SoftBank Robotic’s Pepper can do none of those things, and it already costs over $9,700 when you factor in the mandatory maintenance and insurance fees.
Google has poured millions of dollars into the development of a robot named Atlas, and impressive as it is, it’s still terrible at sweeping floors and moving objects around.
Meanwhile, for the $10,000 you’d spend to have Pepper, which (is it “who”?) is a glorified tour guide, you could outfit your home with a whole boatload of smart devices that can do things no humanoid robot currently can — things like make you coffee, tell you who’s at the door when the doorbell rings, change your light and thermostat settings, and yes, vacuum the floor.
It’s feasible to integrate all of these functions into a single, humanoid robot — but you wouldn’t want to for several reasons.
First, because if any single function stopped working, you’d have to deal with all the other capabilities being offline while the robot was serviced.
Second, why wait for a robot to go see who’s at the door when a smart video doorbell will do it instantaneously? And do you really want a human-sized robot doing your vacuuming? At least it’s easy to step over a Roomba.
The bottom line is that most of humanity’s limitations are a result of our physical form. The ideal personal assistant would be freed from those limitations in order to be as efficient as possible.
Luckily, engineers are generally much smarter than I am, and figured all of this out many years ago. We haven’t waited around for personal assistants to find the perfect humanoid form before integrating them into our daily home and work lives because we haven’t needed to.
We already have Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and more. They might not be able to walk our dogs, but they can make finding a dog-walker much easier. They might not be able to defend us in a physical altercation, but they’ve been known to save lives.
These digital assistants do have a lot of room for improvement, which is why millions of dollars and hours are being devoted to exactly that every day.
In all likelihood, we will see humanoid robots similar to those in I, Robot sometime this century. What we’ll use them for, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be doing the dishes or answering the door.
But long before that, personal assistants that offer customizable functions and seamlessly manage a wide range of smart devices, totally without current versions’ clunkiness, will be available and affordable for nearly everyone.
Now if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go ask Alexa to rent I,Robot for me.
