Are we in an AI bubble? Are we not in an AI bubble? Round and round the blabbering goes, with artificial intelligence’s use case for the masses failing to progress beyond wasting more of our time and spreading lies more efficiently.
There are certainly some niche areas, including in the medical and legal professions, where bespoke AI technology is already making things easier for practitioners. Yet, the bulk of the media-facing AI field is full of tech charlatans stumbling all over one another to create the first humanoid robot that isn’t a useless piece of shit.
The latest example is a video released by the Chinese robotics company EngineAI. In the short film, EngineAI’s humanoid T800 robot delivers a devastating kick to the padded chest of the company’s CEO Zhao Tongyang (“This, is, SPARTA!!”). Zhao Tongyang crumples to the ground.
Well, hey, that’s fun. Kids, it’s cool to cave in the sternum of any tech CEO (this is not legal advice).
Seriously, though, why on earth would we need a kickboxing robot? It seems like getting brutalized by one’s robot would be the opposite of what the average consumer would want. Even if you’re thinking military applications, we already have plenty of drones armed with missiles and machine guns, which experts agree, are more deadly than martial arts.
Then there’s Elon Musk’s Optimus, which he just seems to have gotten caught operating remotely via a human controller at an event meant to showcase Tesla’s autonomous technology. Let’s just say this Optimus had not flopped down onto the ground after removing a phantom virtual reality headset: all it was doing in the first place was pouring drinks and pretending to converse with people.
Ugh, like half the reason for going to a bar is to talk to an actual person and engage in some harmless flirtation with the bartender. If you want your drinks dispensed by a machine, you can already get that at any number of fast foods joints. However, when it comes to mimicking the human experience of sharing a few drinks with someone, I suppose this Optimus did get the crashing to the floor at the end of the night part right.
This whole humanoid AI-powered robot fad is a classic example of big, out-of-touch corporations telling consumers what they want instead of asking consumers what they want. Case in point: a recent survey found that although Americans do tend to prefer at least a vaguely human shape in their household robots, what they actually care about most is that a robot can get things done around the house, especially cleaning.
As someone who once spent a tremendous sum on a Roomba as a gift for an ex-girlfriend (to be clear: I’m not currently out there giving my ex-girlfriends lots of gifts, that would be weird — we were together at the time), I can tell you that robot cleaning technology still leaves a lot to be desired. The Roomba was OK, I guess. It was fun to force the cat to ride around on top of it. But by the time you repeatedly empty the dust and dirt out of the thing, save it from all the times it nearly falls down the stairs or gets hung up in between rooms, unwind all the little stringy things from it that it tangles up within its innards, and vacuum yourself in all the hard-to-reach places, I’m not sure you’re really saving yourself any labor.
Look, human beings are generalists. We can do a great variety of things semi-competently. We can take a lot of stairs before we inevitably fall, for instance, as masters of bipedal motion. But robots are specifists. No human can pound bolts quite as specifically as a robot.
We are at least a couple generations away from a robot repeating your whole day as competently as you. Anyone who says otherwise is a pirate. In the meantime, why don’t we try to create one that can clean the damn john all on its own?
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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