The walking, talking, dancing Optimus robots at the recent Tesla demonstration generatedhuge excitement.
But this turned todisappointmentas itbecame apparentthatmuch ofwhat was happening was actually being controlled remotely by humans.
Take Sophia, for instance, the robot created by Texas-based Hanson Robotics back in 2016.
Obviously these are still impressive in different ways, but theyre nowhere near the complete sentient package.
Let Optimus or Atlas loose in a random home and youd see something very different.
If you thought this was just a year or two away, youre going to be disappointed.
Designing them even to do one specific task well, such as opening a door, is phenomenally difficult.
Known as telemetric control, this has been around for some time, and is becoming more advanced.
Clearly, this is very useful technology.
Telemetric systems are used to control robots working indangerous environments,disability healthcareand even inouter space.
Another major problem is what we can call social AI.
It requires a deeper contextual understanding of people, objects and environments in other words, common sense.
To do this, we had to create commonsense knowledge databases using real-world problem-solving examples enacted by students.
This fundamental aspect of AI has got somewhat lost in humanoid robots over the years.
This isnt to say that significant progressisnt being madetoward autonomous humanoid robots.
Theres impressive work going on intorobotic nervous systemsto give robots more senses for learning, for instance.
Its just not usually given the same amount of press attention as the big unveilings.
However, this may change soon if we can access it from technologies such as Alexa andMeta Ray-Bans.
Maybe in the meantime well be offered robots controlled remotely from a command centre.
Will we want them, though?
