12
votes
A look back at some robotic inventions that didn't quite get there
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- An electric cow, a robot mailman, and other automatons we overestimated
- Authors
- Bill Gourgey
- Published
- Jul 15 2023
- Word count
- 1325 words
As a roboticist who has a deep penchant for the history, I hope a lot of people realize that nearly any sensational "robot" prior to ~1988 was likely a dud, barely working, a 'representational prototype', or just total fraud.
That's not to say that there weren't some absolutely fantastic creations, but a lot of these that were showcased in magazines or local newspapers were more magic acts than real engineering in a lot of cases.
A good catalogue of historical robotics (mostly real!) can be found over at Reuben Hoggett's cyberneticzoo.com one of my favorite website just to browse.
What kind of tech things do we have today that will reveal itself to be duds and fraud? What kinds sound crazy but are actually legitimately already here?
Chatgtp for example is already showing signs of not actually holding meaningful conversations. What else?
Good question, not sure on the hardware front to be honest, will require me to think a bit more on it.
As for tech in general, I think NFTs and nearly all crypto currencies will fall into the dud or fraud category. But that's something I would assume most people would agree with these days. I think blockchain is a great technology, but not for assets.
VR for work will likely be a dud as far as wide-scale usage until we can physically (mentally?) jack into the system, same goes for AR until something like contact lenses come about. Which this company, Mojo, is doing, but having batteries so close to eyes kind of freaks me out and I imagine will for most people. I could see a leap for wireless tech opening up that field, but not sure on the overall visual fidelity of such a small interface. Glasses could work but going smaller and closer to the eyes for contacts requires much less hardware and power requirements in theory. Glasses could work though for it, but the tech isn't quite ready yet.
ChatGPT is a great predictive text machine, but it's rather poor at reasoning. I think AI will have a reckoning very soon due to that very fact. I believe that the tech is available now to build a proper reasoning machine, but we haven't quite nailed how to get there yet. ChatGPT I don't think will ever really be able to become a proper reasoning machine in its current situation. I am also not a fan of LLMs, their power requirements, centralization factor, blackbox factors, or how they are designed and think it's going in the wrong direction for the AI industry that will lead to a waste of time and the next AI winter.
I think there is a lot of possibilities in neural ML and a next generation subsumption architecture, and that if the industry invested more there we would have more long-lasting productive results.
Drones are great for security, sensors, etc but they won't be great for cargo or anything that requires weight, at least not in their current form, that's not to say there aren't some companies that are attempting it very well, but I think costs and energy requirements are prohibitive for the foreseeable future before we have something tangible. Maybe solid state batteries will help solve this? Or should we add solid state batteries to the potential dud category as well? I'm not too well versed in battery systems at the moment. Maybe a hybrid drone propulsion system with helium or hydrogen for additional 'flotation' and weight capabilities. I am also a believer that blimps should make a comeback, but that's a whole other topic - but the technology does exist for it!
I am sure I can come up with a full list eventually, but I'll have to think about it.
Edit: Added section on drones, updated link on Mojo to an article from 2022 instead of the one from 2020.
Agree on NFTs, and partially agree on cryptocurrencies. I suspect cryptocurrencies will probably collapse to two or three that persist indefinitely. The overwhelming and confusing proliferation of various coins and tokens will burst at some point.