I remember having my love of robots crushed in the mid 80s, I had of course seen all the sci-fi movies and when my dad said he was bringing home an actual robot I was pretty much expecting it to be my new best friend. The Omnibot 5402 does deliver in terms of looks, maybe I’m being nostalgic but it has this classic “80s Electronics” charm to it. I mean just look at this cute little guy:

Unfortunately the fun was almost over the minute we got it out of the box. My dad tried to play it off but I could see the disappointment in his eyes, and of course there was the glaring fact that its tiny wheels and weak motors where not going to even make it a few inches across our avocado green shag carpet, much less deliver us drinks from the kitchen.

To be fair I would think even a modern robot would probably struggle traversing 70s shag carpet, as you can see that shit is treacherous AF! 🤣

So my new robot friend was relegated to the hard wood floors of the hallway where we drove him around for a little while and when that got old my dad broke out the good old instruction manual to see what this thing could really do… which really ended up being not that much. It did have an ambitious list of features on paper including the ability to listen for voice commands and there was a way to record a series of movements, using an audio cassette tape built into its chest, but the implementation of these features were haphazard and buggy. I remember him getting increasingly frustrated until he said something along the lines of “Daddy is going to go off alone and figure it out and then come back and teach me how to use it”.

I’m pretty sure he returned it not too long after that. I do remember him demoing some of the features a few days later but I think it just was way to complicated for a six year old and not complicated enough for an electrical engineer who worked for NASA. So it was gone and I remember being really disappointed. I wanted a my R2D2-level sidekick but what I got was a crappy overpriced toy, and my child-brain was starting to understand that life was going to be a bit disappointing when it comes to having a fully functional robot companion.

Cut to modern day where there are more than a dozen well-funded companies who are going to rollout semi-autonomous humanoid robots in the next few years. The children today will grow up in a world where the robots walk among us. We may even soon have robot nannies raising kids. And as dystopian as that may sound it might also work in the opposite direction where these nannies could accelerate their learning and mental health, especially if they didn’t have someone in the home already that could give them that sort of time and attention. If you have never seen a kid play with an Amazon Echo you know they love those things. I mean they are pretty much magic in terms of what it knows and they will never tire of playing that song or reading that story one more time.

Also in the next month or two, Open AI will be rolling out Chat GPT4o which is the new and improved version of their large language model which is capable of having real-time back and forth conversations with you while maintaining a memory of everything you have already said to it. This is in some way is the holy grail of “interfaces” because having a conversation is one thing that everyone knows how to do. If a computer can understand and follow your conversation you can just tell it what you want it to do, even if you are having trouble properly describing it, because it can use the same technology it uses to quantify and interpret the world to understand what you are asking it.

These advancements in robotics and the fact that we now have a brain (the LLMs) that we can throw into their robot body = the rise of the robots. They are saying that the robotics industry will be worth over 20 billion by 2027 and analysts are speculating that you will be able to have an actually useful (dish washing, laundry folding, drink delivering) in-home robot for around $300 per month. It is finally happening, and I am here for it… ready to make up for lost time.