With big, expressive eyes, elfin ears and adorable cooing, Miroka and Miroki could be an apparition from your favorite cartoon. But behind their cute facade, these robots are all sensors and engineering, and designed to perform the drudgery of logistical support in hospitals or hotels.
“Why live with ugly machines,” says Jerome Monceaux, head of Paris-based start-up Enchanted Tools, who was on hand to present the pair at the CES tech show in Las Vegas last week. “I could cut their heads off and erase their colors, but I’m not sure you’d want to share your daily life with them,” he continues.
A number of start-ups are working on robots that look familiar and help humans, without making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Amazon is currently testing Agility’s “Digit,” a two-legged android that wouldn’t look out of place in Star Wars, to carry plastic bins in its warehouses. Enchanted Tools has also bet on team-playing robots, designed to relieve staff of repetitive tasks.
Photo: AFP
But in addition to helping out, Miroki is meant to bring a touch of “wonder” to the workplace.
“It’s a way of celebrating something very beautiful in ourselves and avoid becoming machines ourselves,” said Monceaux. His company hopes to produce 100,000 robots over the next 10 years.
FILLING JOBS
Photo: EPA-EFE
Every CES brings its share of companion robots and androids, but they haven’t gained much ground in homes and businesses.
At the same time, “labor shortage has been the number one problem since COVID across different industries. Today, we have roughly 18 million job vacancies,” said Joe Lui, the global lead on robotics at Accenture.
And while some tasks have been adapted for mechanical arms and autonomous forklifts, many others require language, mobility and understanding of the environment and therefore humans.
Or humanoids infused with artificial intelligence, said Lui, who thinks AI can bring robots into everyday life.
“Humanoids are going to be really like coworkers in the coming years and natural language interfaces like ChatGPT are going to be prevalent,” said Chris Nielsen, head of Levatas, a US company that has integrated generative AI software into Spot, a quadruped robot from Boston Dynamics.
Thanks to generative AI, robots depend less on pre-written scripts.
But “don’t worry, robots like us are designed to help humans make their lives better,” robot Moxie said.
“We always follow the instructions and programs that humans give us. So you have the control.”
As tall as a teddy bear and doped with generative AI, Moxie is capable of interacting with children, telling them stories, giving math lessons and performing dance moves with two arms.
“Moxie isn’t here to replace anyone. Moxie is a mentor, tutor and a friend,” said Daniel Thorpe of Embodied, the company that created the robot.
‘FRIGHTENING’
Two-legged, mobile and autonomous humanoids still have a long way to go before they leave the laboratory. But some of their precursors have at least made it out of CES, like Moxie or Aura, a highly anthropomorphic robot that entertains patrons at The Sphere, Las Vegas’ new concert venue.
“I receive a lot of questions like how old are you, what’s the meaning of life, who’s going to win the Super Bowl?” said Aura to curious viewers.
Aura punctuates her answers with jokes, exaggerated laughter and even rolls her shoulders into a shrug. For Monceaux, highly anthropomorphic robots risk “provoking an epidermic reaction. They create confusion between our humanity and their robot nature, and are frightening. Nobody wants to have one in their home or hospital on a daily basis,” he said.
Above all, he added, “it creates an expectation of behavior similar to our own,” and therefore a risk of disappointment, because the robot doesn’t see and understand the world as we do, and won’t for years to come.”
For Jonathan Hurst, co-founder of Agility, its Digit robot would look strange without a head and creep out humans.
“We had a lot of conversation about that internally at the company” and the head was kept even if it provided no significant technical purpose.
At CES, Adam, a robot barista from Richtech Robotics, serves coffee to delighted attendees and can now make jokes, thanks to generative AI. But to refill the coffee machine with milk, he still needs humans.
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
There is no question that Tyrannosaurus rex got big. In fact, this fearsome dinosaur may have been Earth’s most massive land predator of all time. But the question of how quickly T. rex achieved its maximum size has been a matter of debate. A new study examining bone tissue microstructure in the leg bones of 17 fossil specimens concludes that Tyrannosaurus took about 40 years to reach its maximum size of roughly 8 tons, some 15 years more than previously estimated. As part of the study, the researchers identified previously unknown growth marks in these bones that could be seen only
RSS