You don’t need to have been petrified by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Skynet-commissioned cyborg assassin in 1984’s The Terminator to fret that super-strong, all-terrain, bipedal humanoid robots sprinting up steps, pulling backflips, and righting themselves could be programmed to break our necks on sight. (And laser guns, never give them laser guns.) With the Old Atlas, we … Read more
Peter Chen, CEO of the robot software company Covariant, sits in front of a chatbot interface resembling the one used to communicate with ChatGPT. “Show me the tote in front of you,” he types. In reply, a video feed appears, revealing a robot arm over a bin containing various items—a pair of socks, a tube … Read more
One of those people is Calice Becker, vice president perfumer at Givaudan, director of Givaudan Perfumery School in Paris, and the nose behind Dior J’Adore and other iconic fragrances. In 2018, she saw an opportunity to streamline the complicated development process and spearheaded the birth of Carto, an AI-powered tool that is the “brain” of … Read more
Some robots, including from Boston Dynamics, are already doing warehouse work. Do you expect to see that humanoid workforce growing in the coming years? Warehouse work is one of the great applications at the moment because there’s such a need for people. Employers are really frustrated with the difficulty of getting humans and training them … Read more
You learn a lot about people by hanging out with robots. QT made it plain to me how much human interaction depends on tiny movements and subtle changes in timing. Even when armed with the latest artificial intelligence language models, QT can’t play the social game. Its face expresses emotion, it understands words and spits … Read more
