(qlmbusinessnews.com Tue, 5th Sept, 2023) London, UK —
Imagine the most substantial market for a physical product you can. Are you thinking of mobile phones? Cars? Property? Well, according to Geordie Rose, the CEO of Sanctuary AI, in the coming decades, a new product will emerge that will overshadow these giants.
Sanctuary AI, based in Vancouver, is working on a humanoid robot named Phoenix. When complete, Phoenix will comprehend our desires, understand how the world functions, and possess the abilities to execute our commands.
Mr. Rose states, “The long-term total addressable market is the biggest one that's ever existed in the history of business and technology – which is the labour market. It's all of the things we want done.”
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However, he is cautious, adding, “There is a long way to go from where we are today.” He refrains from providing a specific timeframe for when a robot might be in your home doing household chores, but others in the sector suggest it could be within a decade.
Numerous companies worldwide are working on similar technology. In the UK, Dyson is investing in AI and robotics for household chores.
One of the most prominent companies in this field is Tesla, Elon Musk's electric car company. Tesla is developing the Optimus humanoid robot, which Mr. Musk suggests could be available to the public within a few years.
“Ten years at the pace the technology is moving now is an eternity. You know, every month, there's new developments in the AI world that are like fundamental change,” says Mr. Rose, who has a background in theoretical physics and previously founded a quantum computing company.
While mainstream interest in AI surged late last year with the introduction of a powerful version of ChatGPT, capable of generating various useful text and images, developing AI for robots to perform practical tasks is a more complex and challenging task.
Unlike ChatGPT and its counterparts, humanoid robots must navigate the physical world and understand the relationships between objects in that world.
Tasks that seem easy to many humans are significant challenges for humanoid robots. For instance, Sanctuary's robot, Phoenix, has been involved in a trial project packing clothes into plastic bags in a Canadian shop's backroom.
“The manipulation of bags is actually very, very hard for robots,” Mr. Rose explains, highlighting the substantial gap between today's humanoid robots and their Hollywood counterparts.
Sanctuary uses a system to train Phoenix in specific tasks, like packing bags. They film a particular task performed in partnership with a business, digitize the entire event, and create a virtual environment. This digital environment replicates the physical world, including all objects and simulating factors like gravity and resistance.
The AI then practices the task within this virtual environment, allowing it to make millions of attempts. When the developers believe the AI has mastered the task virtually, it is allowed to try it in the physical world. Phoenix has been trained to perform approximately 20 different roles using this approach.
Mr. Rose envisions that the future of humanoid robots lies in mastering specific tasks that will benefit businesses. Robots capable of performing household chores are further down the road.
One of the most significant challenges is equipping the robot with a sense of touch to gauge the appropriate pressure to apply to an object.
“We have a facility with these types of tasks that comes from an evolutionary heritage, that's like a billion years long… they're very hard for machines,” Mr. Rose explains.
Substantial work remains to be done to develop robots capable of handling all the events that can occur in a home or a busy workplace.
“You cannot put a robot in an unstructured environment and then ask it to move around without basically destroying things. It's too much for technology to ask at this moment of time,” says Prof Alireza Mohammadi, who established the Robotic Motion Intelligence Lab at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
He notes that while an AI can be trained through millions of scenarios, there is always the possibility in the real world that it encounters something entirely new and reacts unpredictably and potentially dangerously.
Part of the challenge lies in embedding a robot's understanding of context and consequences, a capability humans possess intuitively. For example, humans might anticipate that an overly excited dog could jump in front of them and make allowances for it. Developing this capability in robots is exceedingly challenging.
“Within ten years we might have robots that are capable of walking around with some guidance, but not in completely unstructured environments,” Prof Mohammadi predicts.
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However, if these challenges are surmounted, could humanoid robots eventually replace jobs currently performed by humans?
Mr. Rose points out that many countries are facing labor shortages, and his robots could potentially fill these positions one day.
Stewart Miller, CEO of the National Robotarium, a partnership between Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh focusing on AI and robotics, acknowledges this shift.
“Inevitably, there's going to be robots doing jobs that were done by human beings in the past… the question then is, what does that mean?” he says.
“We will go through some growing pains. But when we think about it, we can start emphasising and concentrating on what human beings do best – freeing up that capacity to do that, and not having to spend time doing what machines are best doing.”
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