If you believe 1960’s cartoon The Jetsons then by now robots would be doing all the tedious household chores, all the shopping, and possibly making sweet love to your ‘better half’ while you settle in for this evening’s episode of MAFS.
Yet, the godawful truth about mankind’s attempts to robotise our lives over the past half-century is that all the evidence suggests it’s been an abysmal failure on practically every level.
Take the highlight of the 2022 International Robot Exhibition that just finished up in Tokyo last Friday.
It appears humankind’s fifty-plus years of promised robotics has eventuated in nothing more than a rideable robotic goat!
Yes, the star of the robot fair was a nanny-like contraption called ‘Bex’ that was developed by Japanese motorcycle maker, Kawasaki.
Check out the rather uninspiring mechanical beast in the equally boring promo video below:
And what would one do with a half-arsed robotic rideable goat?
Well, according to the team at Kawasaki, Bex can accomodate a human rider (no more than 100 kilos) who can easily control the contraption via bike-like handlebars.
So enormously shit is Bex, Kawasaki couldn’t even detail its speed capacity, but did say it had been designed “to carry cargo in warehouses and factories”.
Despite Bex’s rather underwhelming output, the International Robot Exhibition was widely optimistic of robots’ place in our future, particularly as the COVID pandemic had highlighted labour shortages across the globe namely in typical blue-collar jobs such as factories and warehousing.
Media reports from the International Robot Exhibition also noted that robots were now undertaking such exciting jobs as “writing thank-you letters to colleagues and carrying plates from a restaurant kitchen to servers”. Possibly further proof we all need worry less about a robot nicking our jobs in the very near future?
