Robotics pioneer ponders: Where are all of the robots?

August 19, 2021

As co-founder of the Amazon Prime Air delivery-by-drone project, groundbreaking technologist Gur Kimchi has done more than his part to usher in a reality full of robots. But in his keynote Thursday, Kimchi posed what he called a key question: Why aren’t there more?
“I have been irritating my friends for literally a decade with this question,” he joked. “Why aren’t there more robots? Where are they?”
Kimchi’s resume includes 10 years at Microsoft during which he helped to develop Virtual Earth & Bing Maps, contextual and geosocial search, cloud infrastructure, augmented and virtual reality, and enterprise communications. He also served on the board of Waze, was an early developer of VoIP technology, and was a co-founding member of the FAA Drone Advisory Committee.
Still, he said, autonomous technologies have yet to achieve the ubiquity envisioned in their infancy decades and decades ago. He laughed as he showed a video of a cat riding what is perhaps the world’s most well-known robot to date: the Roomba vacuum.
Perhaps, Kimchi posited, factions of the autonomy-loving community have slowed progress with perfectionism – always pegging the future to something not achieved quite yet. A series of slides offered examples beginning with the phrase, “If only we had ….” and ending with wish-list items, such as a good grasper, the right sensors, strong AI or artificial general intelligence, and more data.
It might be more productive, he suggested if we could be less intent on getting everything just right and more focused on solving problems, asking better questions, and preventing negative side effects by planning “elegant failures” that we can learn from.