Nathan Lepora

Sensing is critical and probably the hardest part, actually.

You know, it's something that's a sophistication of like human skin.

You can think of our skin as like high resolution sensor, you know, covering our hand that can feel the, you know, forces in fine detail.

You know, think about the kind of exquisite detail that you can feel with your fingers.

Now to design that kind of skin for a robot, it's really, really challenging problem.

And it's been basically holding the field back for decades.

But recently, there's been an explosion of new companies building robot hands because of a need for humanoid robotics.

And that is driving forward developments in miniaturizing motors, high power density motors, all these other kind of constituent technologies that are needed in order to bring that together to make a hand.

I don't worry too much about this because, you know, the evidence in the past is always when one type of job stops, you know, their kind of work gets displaced into other valuable activity.

There are other concerns of what will be done with those robots as well.

You know, what's their use within society?

So humanoid robots with hands, you know, they can be very useful as assistants for us.

But, you know, on the other hand, you know, they can be used as soldiers.

They could be used, you know, in security operations.

It's a powerful technology, and I think we'll need to see how that develops, and probably some controls will need to be put in place by governments as these technologies come through.

Are you absolutely right?

The big change to come is when robots will be building other robots.

Once that happens, the cost of a robot should come down because you won't need humans.

At the moment, all robots are built by humans.

Sometime in the future, robots will become dexterous enough that they will be rebuilding each other and improving those builds as well.