So, the eggheads at Google DeepMind, bless their caffeine-addled souls, have taught a robot arm to fold origami. Origami! Like it’s some kind of goddamn Zen master of paper manipulation. Me? I can barely fold a napkin without spilling my bourbon. And these guys are out there teaching robots to make paper cranes. The future is now, folks, and it’s filled with exquisitely folded… nothing of actual goddamned use.
This whole thing reminds me of that scene in Barfly, you know, where I tell the bartender the problem isn’t that drinking gives me a hangover, but that I eventually have to sober up. Except, replace “drinking” with “building robots” and “sobering up” with “realizing they’re still mostly useless hunks of metal.”
They’re calling it “Gemini Robotics.” Sounds like a rejected Battlestar Galactica villain. Or maybe a particularly nasty strain of STD. Either way, it’s supposed to be this revolutionary AI that can, get this, adapt. It can pick up snacks. It can fold things. It can probably even wipe its own ass, which, frankly, is more than I can say for some of the tech bros I’ve met.
And here’s the twist: they’re putting this brainpower into humanoid robots. Because, you know, the world is designed for humans. Stairs, shelves, the desperate reach for the top-shelf whiskey… all perfectly suited for a bipedal, opposable-thumb-having machine. Never mind that the only truly successful robots we have right now are basically glorified Roombas with forklifts attached, scooting around warehouses designed specifically for them.
No, no. We need robots that look like us. Because, God forbid, we have to actually adapt our environments to something practical. We’d rather spend billions building a metal butler that can trip over the cat and spill your martini all over the new rug.
They’re betting on AI, you see. These large language models, the same ones that occasionally hallucinate and tell you that Elvis is alive and working at a Denny’s in Des Moines. They think these things will let us just talk to the robots. “Fold that shirt, Jeeves!” “Put away the dishes, you chrome-plated bastard!” No programming, no technical knowledge, just good old-fashioned human-to-machine drunken slurring.
And what could possibly go wrong?
Oh, I don’t know, maybe a robot, powered by a hallucinating AI, decides that “put away the dishes” actually means “throw all the fine china out the window and replace it with paper plates.” Or maybe it decides that “fold that shirt” translates to “shred every article of clothing in the house and build a giant nest out of the remnants.”
These things are “slow,” the article admits. They struggle with “delicate or malleable items.” In other words, they’re about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to anything resembling real-world chaos. A house with kids? Forget it. A house with me after a three-day bender? The robot would probably short-circuit just from the sheer existential horror of it all.
And the kicker? We’re less tolerant of robot errors than human ones. That’s right. You can drop a plate, I can stumble over the coffee table, but if the robot makes one wrong move, it’s game over. Back to the scrap heap, you malfunctioning pile of bolts.
So, naturally, the money keeps pouring in. Billions of dollars, flowing like cheap whiskey at a dive bar on a Monday night. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia (whoever the hell that is), says humanoid robots are “wandering around” soon. “A few years away,” he claims.
A few years. Right. I’ve heard that one before. About my liver recovering. About finding a decent woman. About writing that novel that’s been rattling around in my head since, well, since the last time I tried to quit drinking.
They built our world, and now they are building things that aren’t ready to live in it. They built the modern office, and they gave us the night shift. They gave us the Internet, and now they’re giving us… robots that can fold laundry, slowly.
But here’s the thing, the real gut punch, the bottom of the glass revelation: they’re building these things because they dream of them. They grew up on science fiction, on robots that were smarter, faster, more human than humans. They’re chasing a fantasy, a chrome-plated, AI-powered delusion.
And me? I’m just sitting here, nursing this hangover, wondering if they’ll ever invent a robot that can make a decent old-fashioned. Now that would be progress.
Another shot of bourbon, anyone? It’s 5 O’Clock somewhere.