About that robot…

• A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
• A robot may not harm a human being.
• A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
• A robot must know it is a robot.

Isaac Asimov popularized the “Three Laws of Robotics” in his Robot series, starting in 1940. Asimov is a pillar of modern day science fiction. Not “just a writer”, he was a full on scientist, philosopher, and all around renaissance man. Asimov gave us the word “robotics”, and here we are!

What I find most interesting about his earliest explorations in this area is that he put a lot of time (50 years) into thinking about how these automaton would interact with humanity, and how humans would interact with them. Written into his “Three laws of robotics” were an obvious attempt to keep humans relevant and unharmed by the advancement of robotics. You might think he had a deference to humans and only viewed robots as slaves, but that is not the case. He ends up with a master universe scale robot that guides and protects “humanity’s” evolution over the span of millenia.

If you’re wondering what all the hubub is about, I strongly suggest you read the “Foundation Trilogy”, or even start with “iRobot”. Then you’ll say “Hay, wasn’t that the Will Smith movie?”, or “Hay, isn’t “Foundation” on Apple TV right now? Yup, this is where it comes from alright.

Right now, in 2024, we’re marking through AI and Robots at a very rapid clip. The ink has barely dried on our understanding of how to program computers, and we’ve launched full tilt into the creation of autonomous driving, Large Language Models, and humanoid robotics. Of course, “automation” writ large is nothing new. Humanity has been automating since we first picked up tools to smash insects open on rocks. Now is something new though. Now, particularly with LLMs, we’re getting closer to the automation of intellect, and not just labor. All the tools to date have helped up smash bugs better. Food production with automated farm equipment generates yields our grandparents could only dream of. We can produce goods in factories, turning out cars in hours, rather than days. We can even produce rocket engines by the hundreds a year at this point. All simple automation improvements.

But now, we’re automating intellect, meaning, you don’t need that human in the loop to generate the quarterly report. You don’t need the human in the loop to come up with the letter to send to employees wishing them happy holidays. In some cases, you don’t need humans in the loop to come up with the design of a new product, or an original score for a movie, or the entirety of a movie. With emerging tools, such as Sora, you can prompt your way to creating video scenes that are unique, and completely derived from the dream state of an AI.

I do ask myself this though; Where are the three+ laws of robotics?

Are we rushing headlong down this path to automation without any concern for whether humanity is served, or to be served up?

Humanoid robots are particularly interesting, because they embody all the physical automation stuff, while simultaneously being able to embody the intellectual automation as well.

At this moment, there are several efforts under way to create humanoid robots. In some cases, they’re just toys for the kids. Something to kick a little socker ball, or play nursery rhymes. In other cases, they are serious affairs, meant to replace humans on assembly lines in factories. In some cases, they don’t have humanoid features, just a head with some lights. In others, they are striving for human realism, with full on facial expressions and “skin”.

I don’t think there are any universal “three laws of robotics” though, and there probably should be. Having worked at Microsoft, I know there was some effort to put “ethics” into the AI development space, but those efforts were largely around where and how to source the raw data to feed the emerging AI systems, it wasn’t close to talking about how humanoid robots should behave in society. It’s probably similar in other places.

I have gathered a watch list of companies that are engaged in the development of humanoid robotics. I want to watch how they do, not just on the hardware evolution, but on this question of ‘ethics’, or generally how we’re going to evolve these capable beings. Do they become our servants, an evolved form of humans, standing next to us, or our masters and commanders?

A few companies to watch for humanoid robot development

• Tesla – Optimus
• Figure AI – Figure 01
• Boston Dynamics – Atlas
• Unitree – H1

Why now? There is a confluence of factors making humanoid robotics more of a thing now than ever in the past. One are the myriad breakthroughs in machine learning. The LLM market has certainly shown the way, but essentially, we’ve reached a point where ‘training’ is the way to evolve a system, rather than “programming”. It’s easier to show a robot videos of a task, and say “do this”, than to write a ton of code with error conditions, branches, corner cases, and the like. So, that’s a breakthrough.

On the mechanical side, there are advances in batteries (smaller, more power density, cheaper), driven by the revolution in the Electric Vehicle industry. At the same time, compute density continues to increase every year, and become cheaper. And lastly, new kinds of electric motors, actuators, and sensors are being created, partly because of EVs again, and partly because MEMS technologies continue to miniaturize and become more ubiquitous.

The last bit of this is the training models. Being able to simulate an environment as accurately as possible is critical to the rapid training evolution of these new systems. nVidia has been providing the compute density and leading the way for simulation of all manner of environments for AI training.

Couple all this with the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, nVidia, and you have the world’s most valued companies investing in a space that is the stuff of science fiction. There is no doubt. We will have practical humanoid robots capable of accomplishing typical human tasks, within 2024, or 2025 at the lastest. There will be tons of side benefits along the way from continue evolution of electronics, battery, and materials tech. The real question is, will we evolve humanity to match?

This is the essential question. Asimov thought about, articulated, refined, and put into words the laws of robotics, because he was concerned with how humanity would evolve with these new tools. Now that we’re on the precipice of actually delivering on the humanoid robot promise, are we putting in the same consideration, or are we in a headlong rush to push product out the door, no matter the cost or consequence to humanity?

This is one area I want to give some focus to. I think there’s tremendous benefit to be had from continuing down this evolutionary path. I want to do it in such a way that humanity doesn’t end up on the evolutionary scrap heap.

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