Dancing Robots

Yesterday, Boston Dynamics released a video of their robots dancing to “Do You Love Me?” Their movements are truly amazing, particularly when thinking back to the video of robots unable to make it through a doorway at the DARPA challenge just 5 years ago.

The speed of technology advancement is getting ever-faster, and with it societal changes.

Just 13 years ago, no one had a camera attached to a computer and the internet in their pocket. Now entire industries have been transformed by their ubiquity. It’s not just the obvious increase in photographs and videos (increasing the visibility of police brutality, among other things), it’s also the use of the camera as a scanner (e.g., for depositing checks into bank accounts) and the computer (driving AI facial recognition software), and entire swaths of culture and industry that weren’t even imagined before.

What will be transformed by these fully articulating and powerful robots? Science will certainly benefit from the ability to do things like enter volcanoes. Search and rescue could access territories previously unreachable. And the potential for assisting the disabled are numerous (especially when coupled with other advancements like in a video released this month of a quadriplegic who was able to feed himself with a fork and knife using prosthetic arms he controlled through implants in his brain).

What else can we not even imagine at this point which will become part of our every day?

And - because we must always ask this - who will be left behind as technology continues its uneven distribution?