Issue 109: The Robot Doesn't Matter
Welcome to Backstory, a weekly newsletter turning global technology shifts into a three-minute read. This week, we’re thinking about robots – Mary Ames, Director of Strategy
THE BIG TAKE
The Robot Doesn’t Matter
Taking a break from this ongoing saga with Twitter, Elon Musk unveiled a humanoid robot last week amid much fanfare. The two prototypes called Optimus didn’t shock the world with their agility or cunning. They were actually quite lackluster compared with our collective image of advanced robots from science fiction films. The real innovations on display were serious leaps in the power of artificial intelligence.
Beyond the robot: Wired summed up the event and the real news story best. “The robots’ underwhelming debut and the contrast between Musk’s lofty rhetoric and the reality of Tesla’s humanoids reflect how, despite recent progress in artificial intelligence, it remains incredibly difficult for machines to operate in a sophisticated way in the messy, unpredictable real world.”
AI is getting better: In much the same way as Nasa’s mission to the moon was the catalyst for myriad little innovations, Tesla’s humanoid robot will bring several small innovations to the AI space. Musk has underlined that the robot is a vehicle to attract AI engineers to work for this company. These developments will invariably trickle down to our everyday lives in how we use the internet to how we pay parking tickets. Let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We're fascinated with robots because they are reflections of ourselves.”
– Ken Goldberg, artist
CHART OF THE WEEK
Welcome to our new chart of the week section!
In this week’s chart of the week, we are looking at the remarkable decline in shipping costs. For port cities in the Gulf, this is an important stat to watch closely. The cost to send a 40ft container from Shanghai to Los Angeles has fallen by 74% from peak and is back to August 2020 levels.
OUR VIEWS THIS WEEK
Creating the internet: For most of their existence, social media companies have tried their best to stay away from content moderation. Leading platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have repeatedly argued that they can’t be the arbiters of truth or the editors of perceptions. That’s all changing now. Twitter has started moderating content from major figures. In this piece from the archive, we explored how content moderation is a perfect opportunity for small states like the UAE to help define the internet we want.
Cashless future: Contactless payments and digital money are still surging as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We even take them for granted now. But it wasn’t always this way. In an archived article published by Xische , we think about what the cashless shift means for the UAE and how local companies can continue to innovate in the sector.
SPOTTED ELSEWHERE
Chinese batteries in America. The race to manufacture electric vehicles is heated. One might be tempted to see this race in national colors but the recent push by the US state of Michigan to offer hundreds of millions of dollars to Chinese electric vehicle companies to manufacture their cars in the state provides a new perspective. Do you think this is a wise move by Michigan or should the state treat the potential partnership with more caution?
Trouble with superconductors. In a 2020 article published in the journal Nature, physicists at the University of Rochester claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. The announcement was historic and apparently it didn’t happen. Nature has now retracted the study and sent shockwaves through the scientific community. You can read all the juicy details of what happened next in Science.