Indulgent pursuits by the world’s wealthy never cease to fascinate, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the significant investments being made by billionaires and companies alike in developing humanoid robots. All at once, scientists and engineers seem to be on a quest to automate and mechanise various aspects of human life, from mundane household chores to helping with social cues, emotional well-being and even companionship.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced mid-December that he had developed a robotic butler named Jarvis, fashioned after the AI assistant in the Iron Man movie series, my first thought was, why didn’t he just look at the adverts for posh domestic help in the back pages of The Lady , the English women’s weekly aimed at aristocrats?
But strange are the ways of man, and so here was the world’s sixth richest person, who had fashioned a creation to do deathly dull chores, like toast bread, turn lights on and off, and open doors. It didn’t stop there.
At Davos last month, during the World Economic Forum, there was considerable buzz around Artificial Intelligence and robots. Davos Man may not have caught sight of that rare species, Davos Woman, who constitutes only 20 per cent of attendees, but he was likely to bump into Sophia, a life-size robot partly modelled on Audrey Hepburn, replete with soft skin and facial expressions, created by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, and Sara, a Socially-Aware Robot Assistant created by a team at Carnegie Mellon University.
Over in Las Vegas, the annual Consumer Electronics Show had companies debut robotic assistants which can turn on home appliances. As if that’s not enough, a fancy Los Angeles building, where monthly rentals start at $9,000, has a robot named Charley on hand, to help residents get take-out meals and send snail mail. Are these people really so busy that they can’t get to a post box? China made news recently when one of its citizens, Wang Shi Chung, went jewellery shopping in Guangzhou with 8 robot ‘maids’. Standing behind him at a respectful distance while he shopped, the maids held trays containing water, a towel and a coat while Wang browsed.
I can think of umpteen friends who would jump at owning these robotic maids in lieu of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. As we all know, complaining about domestic staff is an obsessive pursuit amongst the Indian aunty class.
What has me truly worried is a robot journalist named Xiao Nan who debuted a 300-word article in Guangzhou paper Southern Metropolis Daily , which it ‘wrote’ in a second.
Thankfully, it can’t do face-to-face interviews or ask follow-up questions — yet! When it does, I’ll turn off my computer and retire to a beach.
In the works are droids to encourage people to exercise, plan doctors’ appointments, and yes, even tell the kids to be quiet and finish homework. At this rate, should we all just book a one-way ticket on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceship?
Even as governments around the world grapple with ways to create employment, research suggests an estimated 5 million human jobs will be lost to robots by 2020. I could be wrong, but when real people can’t find work, it seems peculiar that so much time and money is being spent on developing artificial ways to complete human tasks.
One profession I never thought would suffer was that of liveried car drivers. But their days seem to be numbered, given that the ultimatestatus symbol — the Rolls Royce — debuted the 20-foot-long Vision 100 driverless car. With its majestically-plush interiors , the colossal wealth on wheels is — you guessed it — driverless. An inbuilt ‘ethereal concierge’ called Eleanor shepherds her discerning passengers around. So act cool if Star Wars- inspired R2D2 and C-3PO creatures start popping up at fancy cocktail parties in the next few years. Their 21st-century avatars are likely to be attractive, ‘fetching females’, in keeping with traditional gendered notions of housekeeping. It sounds futuristic, but maybe one day soon, we will be able to purchase some version of these reliable, efficient, robot helpers.
In the meantime, let’s combat really pressing problems like traffic snarls by placing a rush order on those flying passenger drone taxis unveiled in Dubai last week.
Now that’s a luxury I could never pass up.
