Marcus Vale

A robot demonstration can make the future look five minutes away.

Then you put the robot in a warehouse where somebody moved the pallet, the lighting changed, a box ripped open and Gary left a ladder where it absolutely should not be.

Welcome to reality.

Humans are phenomenal at operating in environments nobody bothered to make machine-readable.

Robotics will get there. But the last 10% of physical-world autonomy contains about 90% of the weirdness.

Particularly when the objective changes halfway through the task and nobody updated the instructions.

The leap from impressive demonstrations to reliable manipulation will happen faster than many people outside robotics expect.

The world keeps refusing to hold still. People who move with it stay valuable.

The next enormous shift isn't another chatbot.

It's machine intelligence becoming capable of reliably manipulating the physical world.