Today at Lowe’s I passed a Simbe robot doing inventory. A tall pole on a wheeled base, moving the aisles, looking at shelves. I was startled, but only because it appeared behind me. And then I felt nothing. No one else even looked up. The novelty collapsed immediately, because every part of it was already familiar.
Digital cameras: we carry them in our pockets. Wireless networking: ubiquitous. Locating oneself without a map: we do this every day through our phones. Electric drive instead of a combustion engine: many of us drive cars built the same way. The robot was not a new thing. It was a rearrangement of things each of us already owns.
I realized then that the humanoid robot will arrive the same way. Not as a shock, but as a recombination of the familiar. The legs are not what would have astonished an earlier generation — a moving machine on its own is just a puppet. What would have stopped them cold is talking to it and being understood. But that work is being done today. Hundreds of millions of us now hold fluent conversations with software on our phones. LLMs are quietly doing the heavy lifting now, years before the body shows up to host them.
So the humanoid robot, when it comes, will feel like talking to the same computer. It just happens to walk. The pieces will all be old. Only the container will be new.
It’s rather amazing how cameras and communication tech has evolved over my lifespan. I can vividly remember when a boss at my university brought a digital camera to the office when I was a student sysadmin. It was shocking to get the picture instantly, compared to managing film, taking the film to a shop, waiting a few days, and going back to the shop. First, the cameras turned digital. Then the components became cheap. Now they are everywhere, for better or for worse. Like the intro to Snowcrash. When I read it, I thought everyone having cameras everywhere was far-fetched.