Forget all the high falutin sci-fi stuff from the future. Look around you, the robots are already here. They are not just delivering food to movie stars, or driving journalists like me in robotaxis or helping to perform complex robotic surgeries in hospitals, they are also helping nurses tend to the sick and caregivers with the elderly. They are in factories helping to manufacture our everyday products, or welding and painting cars, or in farms picking fruits and vegetables. They are in stores restocking the shelves or at the back of pharmacies sorting pills and medicines. As drones, they are making themselves useful for surveillance or gathering intelligence. They are also in warehouses packing the boxes from Amazon and Costco that I find outside my door almost every other morning. Suffice to say you can no longer ignore or avoid them.
Readers of this column might recall a piece I wrote about travelling on Waymo robotaxis in Phoenix, Arizona, late last year. More recently, I wrote about Los Angeles-based Serve Robotics, whose robots deliver Shake Shack burgers in Hollywood and bibimbap (a Korean rice dish) in the city’s Koreatown to customers’ doors.
If you are a tourist walking around Hollywood or searching for bulgogi, as I like to do whenever I am there, you are likely to bump into one of the robots every few minutes. They are everywhere, on every sidewalk and street corner, almost like they own the streets of Los Angeles.
