Are the robots coming?
Jensen Huang certainly thinks so.
“This year,” he replied, when I asked him when robots were going to have human-level capabilities.
“Because I know how fast the technology’s moving.
“You’re going to see some pretty amazing things,” he told me.
The CEO of Nvidia – possibly the most powerful figure in global technology – is not alone.
There’s a widespread feeling in tech that artificial intelligence is ready to escape the screen and enter the physical world.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s biggest tech conference, there are robots everywhere you turn.
Vacuum cleaner robots. Lawnmower robots. Farming robots. And lots and lots of humanoid robots – creepy or cool, depending on how you see these things (sometimes – often – both).
Being the big trend of CES can be a curse. Many technologies hyped to the sky at the annual tech fair have failed to live up to their potential.
And it is hard to match the experience of interacting with these robots to the unbridled optimism of figures like Huang.
Many of the robots at CES are so basic they’re not really robots at all, at least in the sense of being autonomous – as soon as anything gets even a little complicated, someone with a remote control rushes across to take over.
That makes them little better than an extremely expensive toy.
Boston Dynamics Atlas robots appeared at the show in Las Vegas. Pic: Reuters
But the excitement about robotics isn’t just hype because there is already a powerful, real example of a robot that has passed what you might call the physical Turing Test – that is, the moment when you can’t tell the difference between human and machine.
Self-driving cars are roaming the streets of several cities in the US, including the ones around CES, and will be brought to London in 2026.
Roads might be a relatively controlled environment, but they are still extremely chaotic, and the risk of getting something wrong is enormous.
If robots can handle that situation, the thinking goes, they should be ready for pretty much anything.
A lot of the excitement in tech about robotics stems from that example, and from the growth in the capacities of generative AI.
‘We have the brain to put inside the robots’
If you can get the AI model to run on the device, they reckon you can effectively give the robot a generative AI brain.
“We finally have the core ingredient to build the missing piece of robots, which was the robot brain,” says Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at Nvidia.
“Once we could do that, then it started making sense to build the robot bodies, because we have the brain to put inside them.”
The movement of those robot bodies is improving very quickly too, as the techniques which enabled AI to read, write and talk seem to transfer over to physical interaction.
It seems to many as if the core technological challenges of robotics have at last been cracked.
“I think in general, everybody who is in this industry, who is on the frontier of this research, believes we now have the basic ingredients to build everything we need for the kinds of robots we’ve been imagining,” says Lebaredian.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with a robot at the show. Pic: Reuters
Pic: Reuters
‘Robots will create jobs’
There’s a common consensus that the home is a step too far for robots at the moment.
It’s too messy, too potentially dangerous and consumers are too price-conscious.
Instead, the focus for companies like Boston Dynamics – arguably the world’s leading robotics company – is industry.
“We think you need to start on industry first,” says Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics.
“We think it’s going to be 2028, 2030 when we have robots deployed in factories and probably be five years after that before they’re really affordable and in the home.”
Factories are a bit like roads – mostly controlled environments where the goals are very clear. So you can see the appeal for tech companies.
Of course, the people who work in those factories will worry about their jobs. I asked Huang if that concerned him.
“Having robots will create jobs,” he replied.
“We have a labour shortage in the world, not by one or 2,000 people, by tens of millions of people. And it’s going to get worse because of population decline.
“And so, we need to have more, if you will, AI immigrants to help us in the manufacturing floors and do the type of work that maybe we decided not to do anymore.”
Read more: Humanoid machine performs real-world task
Different humanoid robots were presented at the event. Pic: Reuters
Playter of Boston Dynamics agrees.
“What we’ve seen when we actually deploy robots with our customers – for example, we have a robot that unloads trailers.
“People are happy to get out of that job, and they’ll go do some other job in the warehouse. They’ll operate the robot. The people who were unloading the trailer now operate the robot.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity to really let the robots do the truly dirty and dangerous stuff.”
Of course, no one can say for sure.
But if robots improve in the way the tech industry expects, we might get to find out fairly soon.
