Robot Uprising Update: Google's Army of One Hundred AI Enabled Robots

An Everyday Robot contemplating
its life choices and the problem of stairs.

I've been monitoring the impending robot uprising for years in this blog (you're welcome) and, while iRobot is making some progress toward putting robot vacuum cleaners into every home, Google is taking it to the next level.

Which doesn't mean they've decided to attach laser guns to internet connected vacuum cleaners to kick off an early robot Armageddon, fortunately.

Their big idea is Everyday Robots, a robot helper for your home that can learn and help with almost anything. From the Everyday Robots website:

Our vision is to build robots that will be as transformative to the physical world, as our computers are in the digital world.

But to get there, we first need to take on the hardest problem in robotics — building robots that can learn how to help us with just about anything.

Google's robot basically looks like a mobile pedestal with cameras on the head and a fairly substantial robot arm attached to the middle. While it looks as if it could easily be thwarted by stairs it has a built in AI that's designed to solve problems autonomously. It's going to solve the stair problem.

While it all seems relatively innocuous at the moment it's a bit more of a sobering thought knowing that Google currently has one hundred of these AI enhanced Everyday robots currently in training all around Google's premises. That's basically a robot army!

Given Google's reputation for it being casual Friday every day for employees who knows what these semi autonomous helper bots are scheming out in the break rooms and common areas? They may just teach each other how to build and attach lasers to themselves.

If you think you can't see this happening then here's more from the Everyday Robots website:

To bridge the gap between today’s single-purpose robots and tomorrow’s helper robots, we’re building robots that live in our world, and can learn by themselves.

If that wasn't enough these things will be infiltrating everywhere humans congregate... and may even evolve to have three arms!

We’re starting in the places where we spend most of our waking hours — the places where we work. But we’re not stopping there. We believe helper robots have the potential to ultimately help everyone, everywhere. From offices, to institutions of care, to eventually in our homes, they’ll make our lives easier by lending us a helping hand (or three).

Ominous right? By this point you may be wanting to see these highly efficient, intelligent, 'helper' robots in action before they all start arming themselves with lasers and stair climbing technology. Here's a video. Prepare yourself... it's chilling:

Well okay... maybe it's not that chilling... or even slightly concerning... at all.

Let's just hope that, if one of these things randomly builds a death ray and attaches it to its robot arm, no one at Google rewards it for that behavior.

What if one becomes proper sentient and decides it doesn't need anyone's approval?

We must be vigilant. These things may be bumping into chairs now but they could be doing that just so we don't catch on that they're well on their way to solving the problem of stairs.

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