Machine-d Living

There is only so much that one can do in one day. I often wish for more than 24 hours daily to have more time to do other important things I give less attention to. While I dive deeper into work as time passes, wouldn't it be nice if I could also do some of those things without actually doing them?

_{Image source: Figure}

One of the things that I never enjoyed doing all through my years in school, even right from when I was a kid, was writing. Using a pen to make notes—I never liked it. But I had to deal with it because there was no way I would advance through academic levels without writing at all. Although things are increasingly different by the day now, having a robot do all that work for me would have been the coolest Christmas gift ever. If I'm being honest, though, that's not the only thing I want a robot for.

Truth be told, robotics became a passion for me not only because they are cool but also because I always think there should be an easier way to do anything; that you can always develop technology to greatly minimize the human input in mundane and monotonous tasks and rather use that human energy to be more productive in some other ways. In other words, I found myself following those dreams just so I could be able to autonomously get some things done with a robot. But guess what? It turned out that I am not the only one who has been thinking this way.

_{Image source: Engadget}

Self-driving cars, humanoid robots, autonomous vacuum cleaners, and robot chefs—we now have different types of robots that are capable of handling certain tasks on their own. Somebody got way ahead of me, and here we are now. But then imagine how life can be way simpler with these bots doing our repetitive, boring, and energy-demanding tasks.

Humanoid robots. Robots with the human factor. It just makes a lot of sense that robots be designed like humans, as they interact with a world built by and for humans. And recently, they have been developing fast, to the point that they are coming to homes.

_{Image source: 1X Technologies}

There's one humanoid robot by 1X, Neo, that's built to be used at home. That's the kind of robot I would like to have. The kind that would do certain tasks for me while I put my energy into other important things. Though they are not perfect yet, they are developing fast, and we only expect them to get better with time.

Something very important about many of the humanoid robots we have now is how they are harnessing AI to improve how they interact with their environment and people. Their speech, for example, sounds so close to humans that unsuspecting people may not even realize that it's a synthetic voice. And also, AI helps them learn and improve on their own. So they could be able to learn and adapt to new changes in their environments and tasks, making them all the more efficient and useful.

Perhaps in the future, there could be a neural pathway between these machines and humans that would enable them to understand what has to be done without us telling them, by us just thinking it to them. That's a little bit uncanny, though—letting a machine read my brain signals—but it is still a fascinating concept that could open us to even greater possibilities. Until then, I would like to have a robot, and I'd have it make my life simpler by delegating tedious, time-consuming tasks to it.