New Week #129 New World Same Humans

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To Begin
This week brings news from Boston Dynamics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The message common to both stories? The humanoid robots are coming.
Meanwhile, the internet reacts to Apple’s new Vision Pro headset.
And the FCC take action against a California company that used AI to create fake phone calls from President Biden.
Let’s go!
🤖 Robots are go
This week, yet further signs that the robots will soon walk among us. I mean, all of us.
The Boston Dynamics humanoid, Atlas, has been a regular in this newsletter over the years. Recently it has been overshadowed by competitors, including the Digit humanoid by Agility Robotics and Tesla’s Optimus.
But this week Boston Dynamics released a video that shows Atlas picking up automotive struts and placing them in a flow cart.
The team say Atlas is using onboard sensors and object recognition to perform the task. The footage is short. But it marks a significant advance for Atlas, because previous videos have shown the robot doing elaborate dances rather than useful work, and those dances have been pre-programmed rather than autonomous.
Meanwhile, in Beijing a research team at the Institute of Automation in the Chinese Academy of Sciences this week debuted their Q Family of humanoid robots.
The research team have reportedly built a ‘big factory’ for the design and manufacture of Q Family humanoids.
Back in New Week #124 we saw how the CCP has ordered ‘domestic mass production’ of humanoids’ to fuel economic growth. Remember, this is the underlying demographic reality that has China dashing towards robots.
⚡ NWSH Take: In last month’s Lookout to 2024 I said this would be the year of the humanoid. We closed out 2023 with the announcement that the Digit humanoid had started a trial inside US Amazon fulfilment centres. Days after I published the Lookout, BMW announced a trial of Digit in its California manufacturing plant. Now, the Boston Dynamics team are clearly eyeing commercial applications, too. Their Atlas robot has so far remained a research project; the question they’ll have to answer if they want to change that is whether Atlas can match Digit and Tesla’s Optimus for autonomous capability. // The graph above tells the underlying socio-economic story here. Both the CCP and innovators in the Global North know that working age populations are falling. If economic growth isn’t to become a distant memory, we need new armies of autonomous workers. AI applications can handle some of our knowledge work. But we’ll need humanoids to do some of the physical work that currently only people can do. The CCP see this as an existential imperative; they know they must maintain GDP growth. For innovators in the US and beyond, it’s an epic opportunity.
👀 Having visions
No one could have missed the launch of the Apple Vision Pro a few days ago.
Years from now, this instantly iconic magazine cover will no doubt spark intense nostalgia for the simpler times that were 2024:
It took about ten minutes for someone to try out their new Vision Pro while using Full Self Drive in their Tesla:
This was later revealed to be (surprise!) a skit for YouTube. Still, it delivered useful findings; the man in the picture, Dante Lentini, says the Vision Pro doesn’t really work inside a moving car because it can’t properly display visuals over a fast-moving landscape.
⚡ NWSH Take: After the frenetic metaverse hype of 2021, many will shrug at the launch of the Vision Pro. But something real, and powerful, is happening here. The internet is going to become part of the world around us. In the end, this is about the deep merging of information and physical reality, of bits and atoms, that I wrote about in the essay