Humanoid robots — no longer a sci-fi fantasy?

Blazing Reader,

"The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner," says Jensen Huang, the CEO of AI chip company Nvidia.

Here's an excerpt from an MSN article about humanoid robots that can literally step into our shoes, apply for our jobs and even water your plants:

"Years of steady progress have made legged robots better at balancing and stepping through tricky terrain. Improved batteries allow them to operate for longer without trailing industrial power cords. AI developers are adapting the innovations behind services like ChatGPT to help humanoids act more independently."

They are so human they aren't even called "androids" or "humanoid robots" but simply "humanoids." And darn creepy humanoids at that (based on the photos shared in the article).

“You have all the breakthroughs needed to be able to execute on this problem, which is building robots that interact with the real world like humans do," said Sankaet Pathak, founder of the San Francisco-based humanoid robots company Foundation.

This parallels the epigraph at the beginning of chapter 9.01 of my novel, All the Humans are Sleeping:

"Integral to the ability of machines to understand and simulate human beings was the necessity for machines to adopt a humanoid form. This approach was based on the theory of embodied cognition — that certain aspects of human intelligence were closely tied to our incarnate state.”

Oddly enough, Domestico, the humanoid robot with a British accent, a purple suit and aspirations to be a poet, seems to be readers' favourite character in All the Humans Are Sleeping. If you haven't met him yet, you can check out a free sample of the novel or buy yourself a copy at AlltheHumansAreSleeping.com.

John C.A. Manley

P.S. How near-future All the Humans Are Sleeping is reminds me of the Max Headroom analogy: "20 Minutes into the Future..."

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.