In a Wall Street Journal piece about the (further) rise of the machines, Carnegie Mellon roboticist Illah Nourbakhsh’s looks at the time when the digital and physical worlds will fuse. It’s an interesting article, though his timeline seems way too aggressive to me. The opening:

“Sunday, April 1, 2035. You are house-hunting, driving to an open house showing to meet the owners, and now your car is speaking Esperanto, thanks to your daughter’s April Fools’ antics. Eventually you convince the car to return to your native tongue, and it queries whether you want your usual morning Starbucks cappuccino delivered to your destination. You arrive, jump out, and a Starbot punctually lands to deliver its coffee payload. Consulting the shared family calendar, the car requests permission to leave and fetch your daughter from soccer.

A Realtor bot trundles out to warmly greet you and connects you via telepresence to the homeowners, who are still in Florida. Together, you and the robot-embodied owners tour the apartment. The bot offers to arrange and project your home furnishings into each room, remapping furniture locations and adding several retro 1990s table lamps made available for single-command purchasing. The lamps seem strangely familiar, and you realize why—you glanced at them in a digital storefront last week. The robo-advert must have tracked your gaze direction and, ever since, you have seen digital versions of the lamps cropping up everywhere. The telepresence patch that the owners are using is probably free, sponsored by product placement. By the end of the tour, you’ve decided against the apartment, but you buy the lamp, asking for in-home delivery. It will be 3D-printed on-demand, installed and turned on, waiting for your return home.

The robots are coming. But they won’t all be shiny, Apple-designed C-3PO look-alikes with middle-aged Siri brains. I believe the robot invasion will be a hodgepodge affair, with legs, propellers and wheels; robots that run the gamut from embodied android forms to robotic technologies hidden in the woodwork of our homes.”

Google isn’t striving for driverless cars just so its employees can get to work more easily; it wants to sell the software to every automaker. The same likely goes for the robots it plans to build. From Illah Nourbakhsh’s New Yorker blog post about the company’s recent robotics-buying binge:

“While some analysts initially suggested that Google’s goal was to more thoroughly automate factories—highly controlled environments that are well-suited for a fleet of semi-independent robots—it’s now clear that the company’s team of engineers and scientists has a vision of truly dexterous, autonomous robots that can walk on sidewalks, carry packages, and push strollers. (A disclosure: Carnegie Mellon’s Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment Lab, which I direct, has partnered with Google on a number of mapping projects that utilize our GigaPan technology.) Before its acquisition of Boston Dyanmics, Google ingested seven start-ups in just six months—companies that have created some of the best-engineered arms, hands, motion systems, and vision processors in the robotics industry. The companies Meka and Schaft, two of Google’s recent acquisitions, designed robot torsos that can interact with humans at work and at home. Another, Redwood Robotics, created a lightweight, strong arm that uses a nimble-control system. Boston Dynamics, Google’s eighth acquisition, is one of the most accomplished robotics companies on the planet, having pioneered machines that can run, jump, and lift, often better than humans. Its latest projects have focussed on developing full-body robot androids that can wear hazmat clothing and manipulate any tool designed for humans, like front loaders or jackhammers. The potential impact of Google’s robot arsenal, already hinted at by its self-driving car effort, is stunning: Google could deploy human-scale robots throughout society. And, while Amazon is busy optimizing delivery logistics, Google bots could roboticize every Amazon competitor, from Target to Safeway.

If robots pervade society, how will our daily experiences change?”