I recently watched the film I, Robot again, and despite its cautionary nature, it had the opposite intended effect. I want robots walking around outside. I want automated busses. I want robot pals that I can hang with, and complain about how much better reaction times they have than me when we play games.
My wish may be closer than most think. Some may remember the excellent South Park episode where Cartman pretends to be a robot named AWESOM-O in order to pull a prank on Butters. What I didn’t realize at the time (though found out shortly later) was that AWESOM-O (albeit spelled differently) was real. ASIMO is one of the premier ‘bots literally walking around. Hailing (of course) from Japan, ASIMO is probably the more recognized robot-about-town, but others have risen to prominence for various feats.
The HUBO, constructed in Korea, sports one of the most expressible faces on a robot (and has been made to resemble Albert Einstein). QRIO, from Sony was the first humanoid robot to achieve running speed (as in movement involving both feet off the ground at once). You may have also seen four of the latest models dancing to Beck’s song “Hell Yes,” if you saw the music video.
Finally, in the interest of Robo-diversity, Boston Dynamics has given us one of the coolest, codenamed BigDog. Created to be a next-gen “army mule” BigDog is a four legged beat of burden that has an amazing sense of balance. You can find videos on Youtube of BigDog walking on ice, and regaining his balance after being shoved by one of the researchers. (I, personally, would never do such a thing, because the last thing I want for an enemy is mule-sized robot). There is truly nothing as simultaneously chilling and awesome as watching BigDog gallop across a room and jump over a simulated gap in the floor.
Considering that we can do so much this early into my lifetime makes me incredibly eager for future years. Imagine living in a world where humans walk the streets with ASIMOs and QRIOs walking around with us. A world where EMTs are assisted by their faithful BigDogs; where bus drivers are the busses themselves and cars do more driving than you do.
And this is just one aspect of what’s waiting for us. You don’t have to be a sci-fi geek to appreciate the changes we’re seeing on a day-to-day basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if just 15 or 20 years from now, we’re all driving (or being driven by) hydrogen cars past hydroponic farms, and massive fields of solar cells and windmills. We’ll be talking to people from across the world just on the street through video screens that link real-time. Look around. Look at news sites. Watch the Discovery channel. The world outside is becoming more like the world in our books and in our movies and in our T.V.s everyday, and it cannot get here soon enough.
