Prime Movers Lab Publishes “Robots and Humans” White Paper
The movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence came out in 2001, and for many, it was their introduction to the phrase “artificial intelligence,” and despite the evolution of the industry, the term “AI” will always be inextricably entwined with Haley Joel Osment’s Mecha humanoid robot. The media of the 90s and 00s were filled with these types of portrayals of the robotic future to come. I, Robot, The Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, and so many more depicted a robot-filled future, and in most of these popular depictions, the robots took human form. The media was a reflection of the real excitement of the time. Those decades saw the birth of Boston Dynamics and the DARPA Grand Challenge. So twenty to thirty years later, are we any closer to this vision of the future?
Our fellow Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte spent the last five months doing a deep dive into the current state of the robotics industry trying to find out where all those robots that we were promised are. It turns out that the kids raised on the movies of the 90s and 00s are now trying to build the humanoids they grew up with, but all the money and publicity devoted toward those efforts obscure some of the more exciting things happening in the space. Advances in computational power and the deep learning revolution have enabled rich perception and understanding of the world. We can use those advances to make robots more like humans but also to broaden our sense of artificial intelligence beyond the human form. As roboticist and co-founder of iRobot, Rethink, and most recently, Robust.AI, Rodney Brooks, wrote “It is unfair to claim that an elephant has no intelligence just because it does not play chess.”
In our deep dive, we evaluated companies creating robots that go beyond current human capabilities doing everything from navigating the deep ocean to the inside of the human body. In this white paper, I will lay out the current state of robotics technology, the trends we have observed, and what makes now a particularly exciting time to invest in robotic technologies.
To read the entire thought paper, click on the link below.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
