Hi, y’all! As every week, I would like to start welcoming my new subscribers and others who land here for the first time. A bit down, you will find more background on the themes of this weekly news update. As always, let’s begin with some triggered thoughts.
Triggered thoughts
I could easily follow up on last week’s thinking on LLMs as an interface to the real world or the new introduction of Meta with an LLM inside all chat apps, another example of the Meta strategy to ‘borrow’ a concept from Snap (MyAI) and try to excel in execution and levering the scale. But let me do that another moment.
Related, though, are the new robotic performances by the Atlas successor, Boston Dynamics’ most famous multi-purpose robot, which has gotten an even more humanoid look now. It has an “influencer-style” ring light 🙂 (others called it a desk lamp). See this short introduction movie.
Humanoids are clearly a popular wave of robotic performances now. It feels, though, more like a way to create and shape the market. I doubt this will be the end stage of robotic performances. It has been a topic almost every week, but it is much more interesting how “normal” objects that have certain tasks will be robotized. Maybe in the kitchen, at first, or in the garden. Or just become your partner in serving coach hanging with the right activity level. Something that will be entering our personal moving living rooms first: the car interiors, where massage functions were ultimate luxury but are introduced in lower market segments too.
Helpful, friendly robotic objects are in the near future. This week, I saw the first results of the student teams working on the ITD project designing neighborhood navigators, a type of hood that is shared and works in collaboration to become part of the future neighborhood life. All four teams chose not to focus on creating a typical robot but tried to explore the interactions of the robots with the community of residents in the neighborhood. A team created a hood, that collects leftover flowers from shoppers at the market and delivers these to neighbors that are stuck at home. Or get a wish that another shared, while taking a community activity. Another made an intuitive way to generate ideas together for making a greener neighborhood, with the robot as the initiating partner. Or one is making tags from virtual graffiti that would “stick” to landmarks in the neighborhood, stimulating working together.
The intention of the project was to get the team inspired to work on robots that do interventions for more community life in the neighborhood by taking action. The first concepts are promising and also make super clear how subtle choices have a big influence.
Read the notions of the news, paper for this week and events to track, via the newsletter. You can also subscribe for weekly updates on Tuesday 7 am CEST.
target is new 