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A few years ago, we had the Pepper robot to visit as a short-term guest. Once he overcame the gleam in his eyes, but hungry for power, the $ 1,800 emotion-reading robot was a decent entertainer: he rode somewhere between Duplo and Netflix with the ability to captivate two under-sixs for one afternoon.
But Pepper, once you look further the novelty of his act, was fundamentally a huckster: an over-the-top seller of his limited merchandise. And he wasn’t just any salesman. The robot, like the prized creation of SoftBank and the embodiment of the great vision of the company’s founder-futurist, Masayoshi Son, was the huckster.
On his mechanized shoulders rested the exciting promise of the artificially intelligent humanoids of the home mass market and, more generally, that Son was as right about consumer-oriented domestic robots as he had been about the broadband, smartphones and chips that supported SoftBank’s fortunes. . That’s why the fate of this little automaton and the twist that surrounds it have now been so fascinating.
Last week, SoftBank confirmed it a Reuters report that not only had it stopped Pepper production indefinitely last summer, but was restructuring the Paris center of its robotics business, the key unit for Pepper’s development since the acquisition of SoftBank by French company Aldebaran Robotics in 2012. The most inattentive observer of Pepper’s stumbling infiltration into human society will not have been surprised by the news.
Since its introduction to the world seven years ago, Pepper has not kept its promise. He has not been dishonored and it is always possible that, somewhere in his travels, he has inspired a future generation of robot engineers. But his work as an ambassador for automation has been mediocre, its functionality limited, and the idea that this puppet face finds a natural and meaningful place in private homes has seemed increasingly unreasonable.
At least 27,000 Peppers have been produced (SoftBank claims the number is higher, but will not be specified), and many of those who are amused to see how customers ignore them in SoftBank’s mobile phone stores. Others have been drafted to greet and fight at airports, museums and the like. Dozens of people were put into service public of the pandemic era for sporting events; many can be seen today in the farthest rubbish dumps of Tokyo shops, with their heads tilted and power cords disconnected. He has clearly survived his unnatural life.
But wait, SoftBank protested vigorously: don’t override this particular humanoid or our broader commitment to the vision of domestic robots. Nothing has changed. A pepper factory may currently be suspended, a spokeswoman said, but will resume when inventories are met and demand resumes.
The critical issue here is not when the market will call again to get more Peppers, because they almost certainly don’t, but why SoftBank is so reluctant to declare Pepper dead and introduce us to its successor. By maintaining support for Pepper, it seems that SoftBank lacks one of the most important features of humanoid robots: that, at the very least, they are supposed to fail.
The important distinction, forcefully portrayed by all commercial robotics events, is between serious factory automation robots, for military or medical use, and waiters (often humanoids), pancake fins, and shirt folders. The first ones are ready to transform your factory, logistics center, nursing home or battlefield today. The latter are there to traverse the future with concepts of innocent servitude, unconditional companionship and, above all, ambition. The first group surprises with what they can do; the second demands forgiveness for what he still can’t, but with a twinkle that says, “I’ll be worthy someday, master.”
The only way this second group remains attractive is with the notional existence of a large tree of constant growth, a place to which Pepper now belongs not because it is horrible, but because it should currently be doing better. robot to take its place. The problem with SoftBank, as suggested by Pepper’s undead death, is that while there is plenty of room for maneuver for Son to make a mistake about many of his technology investments and a overall winner, is more vulnerable to criticism when it comes to stated visions of the future of the kind Pepper inhabited.
If SoftBank’s problem is that it has in fact not invested in a successor to Pepper (which would also fit with the company) very small stake in the robotics group Boston Dynamics), we should expect an explanation of why home-based humanoid robots are not found in our immediate future. If so, now is the time to introduce the heir to the world. Either way, SoftBank should not mourn the death of this particular seller.
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