If you want your stuff moved from one corner of a room to another, we've got some really great news - Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot is all over that.
Every other week it seems that a different humanoid one-ups the last one - we're already seeing them chat, do laundry, move in with you and serve drinks dressed in a cowboy hat (though there is a general belief that this latter one was actually remote controlled, because no self-respecting autonomous robot would allow itself to be dressed like that).
Here, Atlas does a pretty good job of shuffling across the floor carrying something and putting it somewhere else. The beginning of the move away from humanistic restrictions is evident - the way that it swivels 180 degrees across its waist is a bit freaky at first, but it's what we're going to get used to working with very quickly.
I think of it like the first attempts at aeroplanes - we tried to make them like birds, because they were what we knew could fly. It was only with our greater understanding of thermodynamics that we then just built something that looks and flies nothing like a bird, but uses the same physics and is millions of times more useful to us.
Robots will become the same - they'll start off humanoid and then become the shape that they need to be to do what we want them to do most efficiently. So get used to being weirded-out first, then quickly seeing that actually the compromises that our human form have to make to do the generalist tasks we take on don't have to apply to robots like Atlas.
Not sure that I'd be getting this particular one to pour my drinks - and it would definitely spill them before they got to the table ...
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