The domestic robot gets closer with Figure 01, powered by Open AI. But does automated servitude degrade our humanity? Or liberate it?

For everybody trying to save the world—as well as get their chores done—but feeling somewhat worried about the advancing wave of Ai, automation and robotics… the above video is challenging, on all three fronts.

We’re seeing Figure 01, a robot driven by OpenAI’s Chat GPT programme. As you’ll see, it can execute dextrous and difficult domestic tasks. It does so with startling elegance of movement (though seems to need a second or two to process the requests).

The robot butler/housemaid is, of course, one of the oldest tropes (and dreams) of robotics and AI. And it’s ambivalent, right? Sky-high piles of SF stories have been written about humanoid (or human-matching) robots rising up and rebelling against their positions of servitude, gaining a consciousness that demands liberation.

Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I. is the grandest of these tales, showing the harshest mirror to the human condition. This society takes glee in robot destruction, while the “mechas” themselves survive a human civilisation that has drowned the planet through environmental degradation.

Yet we may not need eco-apocalypse to shame ourselves about our attitudes to robots and their role as domestic servants. Should everyone really be so aristocratically elevated above the tasks of reproducing our living conditions? What would this relation of robots-in-servitude do to our own relations with each other, as humans?

On the other hand (as the World Economic Forum once wrote), the 20th century’s most important technology, in terms of positive impact on humanity, was “the washing machine” (alongside other labour-saving technologies for the home). Women’s liberation from back-breaking domestic labour has liberated them, and those who accompany them in life.

So will be wise enough to limit these objects to the status of “tool”, rather than “colleague”? Or will we have to prepare for purpose, will and intent arising among these complexifying machines?