“We want to take all the robotic stuff and give it to the robots—which then allows for us humans to be more human.”
—Hans Peter Brondmo
1. The robots are coming. In fact, they’re already here.
Imagine this: you’re at your desk at work when a robot rolls up to you. It has a head like a rounded rectangle and one long arm. It addresses you by name and asks if it can tidy up your desk. When you say yes, it picks up the trash on your desk (maybe a granola bar wrapper or a plastic cup), places the trash in a tray at its base, nods to you, and rolls away.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening.
As CEO of Everyday Robots, Google’s AI and robotics moonshot, Hans Peter helped to build robots like these for simple tasks like cleaning cafes, sorting trash, and clearing desks. His ultimate goal? To make robots so functional and efficient that they could take on an ever-expanding variety of tasks, from making the bed to taking care of the elderly.
But Hans Peter wants us to know that these robots won’t be scary or off-putting, like the Terminator. Rather, like WALL-E, they will come to be helping hands and collaborators.
2. Robots can help us live a better life—if we play our cards right.
“AI and robots are the future of work,” says Hans Peter. “AI is going to touch so many aspects of our lives when it steps off the screen and into the physical world—which is really what robotics is about.”
If, in the future, work becomes a collaboration between the robots and ourselves, then we need to stop talking about the future of work and start talking about the nature of work.
In the short term, this means that we need to start playing with AI today. “Start using this stuff,” Hans Peter tells Lavin. “Don’t restrict your employees from using it, but hold them accountable to the output. Have them do the human layer on top, which is critical analysis and thinking. Have your business become a learning organization that learns how and where AI fits into your daily workflows.”
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