It’s 2020 — Where are the robot butlers I was promised?
A common trope in future-predicting 20th century media was household robotic butlers, and yet looking around today we find this not to be the case. A trend with advanced technology is that the software or math generally predates the hardware required to create the advanced technology — sometimes by centuries. In the case of robot butlers, software is capable enough to do very basic tasks. The limiting hardware is adequate actuators.
Often times in industry money making opportunities will be the driving force of whether a product lives or dies. The only common market for actuators has been for things that humans can’t do. Humans can’t lift a two ton truck load of dirt nor open and close a valve with millisecond levels of precision nor survive the vacuum of space. It’s these shortcomings of ours that have lead to the development of powerful and accurate mechanical actuators.
Up to this point there has been little to no need for small actuators on the order of hundreds per square inch. If we were to create a humanoid robot, it would need to look and function like us to be able to use our tools. They will need to not only use our heavy tools but also tools that require fine motor skills. Typing on a keyboard, walking up stairs, handling children, getting groceries, using utensils, and other things that require delicate precision. The path to precision actuators in this manner comes from an unlikely place: cell phones and vehicles.
Why cell phones and vehicles? Because of 2 things:
- Market Size
- Life Cycle
Think about everyone you know who has a smart phone and/or a vehicle with a screen in it. Most people get new phones every 2–3 years and new vehicles every 6 years. Digital screens offer advantages over analog control systems, particularly their ability to display different apps within the same space and to easily receive updates after leaving the production line. One massive downside of a touchscreen is the lack of tactile feedback. At every point in the interaction processes you must be looking at the screen to use it; but not for much longer.
Cell phones have been going through a type of renaissance the past few years. With customers being sick of the solid brick format, manufacturers had to innovate. The industry seems to have collectively agreed that foldable glass is the way forward. With this new technology comes new horizons.
Tell me then, Reader, what happens when a screen is able to bend at the size of individual pixels? All of the benefits of digital controls with none of the deficits. Imagine an app that displays a set of sliders:
Since the screen is bendable at the individual pixel level, the sliders can be physically raised up to provide tactile feedback. As soon as the slider is no longer on the screen, the screen will sink back down until it is flat. This method could be set up to respond to volume sliders, important buttons in apps, dials, and a whole manner of other things. Neverminding that this would make driving safer since the driver will no longer need to take their eyes off the road, it will create a massive demand for tiny precision actuators.
Over time this singular piece of technology in an established market will become cheap enough that it can be used at scale as a core component in experimental markets — such as mechanical muscle fibers in a robotic butler. Human muscles are made up of strings of proteins while Mecha Muscles will be made up of strings of actuators. These lines of precision actuators will provide robots with the finesse and accuracy that is often required in day to day human life.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in 12 years we start to see news coverage about startups building humanoid robot butlers and in 15–20 years being commercially viable. Imagine that, heading to Wal-Mart and picking up a robotic butler like it’s just another piece of furniture. Hell, if there are any screws missing or it gets damaged the robotic butler could order replacement parts.
The software of today is smart enough to be our robotic butlers, if only in a limited capacity. We have self driving cars that can perceive the world around us, but only through the context of a car. We have AI that can understand the sentiment of the markets and make trades based off of it, but only through the context of the stock market. Algorithms are all around us as they determine what we watch, hear, and read, but only through the context of the internet.
In all of these cases the AI has a platform through which it is able to perceive the world and express its intentions. This will happen with robotic butlers — all it takes is a little hardware ingenuity.
