Ian McIntosh is a professional skier who routinely hits the slopes to shoot awe-inspiring videos. But his career nearly ended while working on a video for Teton Gravity Research. According to the company, which uploaded the footage, "[Ian] dropped into a line he thought he had studied thoroughly enough, only to fall into an unseen five foot deep trench on one of his first turns.

In fact, a recent report from research firm McKinsey found that the jobs most at risk from the COVID-19 crisis were also those most likely to be automated in the next few years: namely, customer service and sales, food services and building occupations.

Now, what von Hollen sees as the biggest obstacle to cobots is awareness of what the technology can do for businesses -- and how easily it can do it.

Not only are robots looking more like us, they are edging into our creative and spiritual lives. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, people are seeing added value in mechanical workers that can deliver food, disinfect surfaces, and enforce social distancing without compromising anyone’s health.

It’s not so much that the premise of the question is flawed — it’s more a question of reframing it slightly. “Why aren’t there more robots?” is a perfectly valid question for a nonroboticist to ask.

“We want to be able to provide labor to the world, not just for one thing, but for everybody who needs it,” Rose said. “The systems have to be able to think like people. So we could call that artificial general intelligence if you’d like.

The trend has a name: so-called 'collaborative robots', or 'cobots', are those designed for direct interaction with humans.

With access to huge existing troves of text and image data, researchers can “pre-train" their robot models on the nuances of the physical world and how humans describe it, even before they begin to teach their machine students specific actions.

If you were that kid who was always terrorizing the other children at slumber parties by telling stories about serial killers, The Little Fears is the YouTube channel you've been dreaming about.

Image Credits: Covariant Obviously, I didn’t let that stop me from asking most of the folks I spoke to at ProMat for their takes on generative AI’s future role in robotics. The answers were . . . wide ranging. Some shrug it off, others see a very regimented role for the tech, and others still are extremely bullish about what all of this means for the future.

Longer term, even more advanced ideas are already percolating. One is “liquid” neural networks, which act more like the biological brain than traditional neural networks and use dynamic connections to continuously adapt to and learn from new data.

The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in What are the cons to robots all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business. More than half the world’s population sees AP journalism every day.

“The intention is not to start from the beginning and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,’” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.”

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