The near future of so-called autonomous humanoid robots is not quite what we imagine.
Come with me to 2029, when a dark side of the robotic world becomes reality. The robots we will deploy in care homes and kindergartens – those humanoid robots who look after our elderly and children – are now revealed to be controlled by underpaid and overworked human operators in sweat shops on the other side of the world.
Yes, of course, we will one day have fully autonomous, talking robots in the future. But for quite some time between now and then, the best way to achieve this is to have some level of human control. I don’t think it will be benign and beneficial to the operators, sadly.
There’s a cautionary tale here about capitalism, worker rights, technology hype and the illusions of progress.
TRANSCRIPT
The mystery of those Optimus Robots that are in care homes across America has now been solved and unfortunately, it’s a worse story than any of us imagined.
My name is Graeme Codrington. This is ThrowForward Thursday, where every week we jump into the future and have a look at a news headline to see what might happen and discover if there’s anything to learn about it today.
Today, I want to take you to 2029. Yes, not that far into the future, but I want to take you to a world where a number of companies have been trying, but failing, to produce humanoid robots that can interact with us in our homes and our personal spaces.
Of course, it was way back in about 2021 that Elon Musk first launched the idea of robots as a Tesla’s new product. Everybody laughed because what it really was was just clearly a person dancing in a robot suit, Elon Musk style. Then, of course, in October of 2024, he had a massive party where he launched a number of products, including what he called Generation 2 of those Optimus Robots as if they had been a Generation 1, but anyway, let me not be too cynical.
And here again, people were suspecting that behind these robots were, in fact, human operators. And that turned out to be true, both in controlling the robot’s movements and doing the thing that Elon was trying to push, which is having AI or language models engaging with humanlike conversations and talking interactions with these robots.
Of course, we know that the robotic mechanical side is available to us. Boston Dynamics and their robots have been developing at pace for more than a decade, but when we now start putting these into humanoid form and creating some form of interaction, intelligent interaction with human beings, we’re taking robots to the next level.
And what I suspect that we will discover over the next few years is that although the technology is surely possible sometime time in the future, probably what’s most likely to happen in the near future is that we have human-assisted robots in our workplaces and in our homes. And this might end up being the dark part of the story.
You might remember Amazon launching their Amazon Go stores with great claim a number of years ago, saying that these were now entirely automated stores where humans could go in and take things off of the shelves, and basically, cameras and sensors would analyse what you had taken, charge it to your Amazon account as you left the shop, and we needed no cashiers, no security guards, it was all automated and digital.
And then we discovered in early 2024 that actually what was happening was there were cameras in those shops and thousands of low-paid, I’m going to say underpaid, Indian workers on the other side of the world we’re literally watching the cameras and doing everything or most things manually in the background. It wasn’t automated, it wasn’t robotic, it wasn’t robotic process automation, it wasn’t artificial intelligence, it was just cheap labour.
And I think that that’s what we’re going to see with so-called humanoid robots that have conversational capabilities over the next few years. That, first of all, it simply is a little magic trick, as Elon did at his launch in October 2024. Then it will become part of the training process as humans work alongside robots that have got learning algorithms as part of their process, and then after a number of years, who knows how long it will take, but surely into the 2030s at least, we then might see some early forms of totally autonomous robotics that have these communication interactive modules.
But we’re a long way away from that and the large language models that back all of the sub generative AI are also a long, long way from being intelligent. They might be good replacements for encyclopedias, and they might be able to take everything human beings have known and using probabilities, give you a reasonably accurate average of what human beings might have said in a particular circumstance in the past. But we will very soon realise that we’re not talking to something with real intelligence, and we’re not talking to something that is approaching a human-type interaction.
Unless, of course, there is an underpaid, underappreciated human actually somewhere in the background with a VR goggle on controlling the robot and having a conversation with you. And assuming that they are underpaid interns, I’m pretty sure that that conversation will not reach the heights of human intelligence that we might be hoping for from those robots. All due respect to the interns who work for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Right, there we go, a little bit of a cynical view of the future at the moment. Well, no, it’s an optimistic view of the future. It’s a cynical view of the Charlatans who are trying to pretend that we’ve arrived there already. We need to keep working, we need to stop releasing products that are promises, not realities and we need to make sure that we provide products and services that actually make a difference in real people’s lives and are not just cute children’s shows.
Anyway, thank you for joining me in the future, thank you for listening to my rant about the present. I’ll see you next week in the ThrowForward Studio again.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.