The robots never came. At least not Google's. I remember when the company pulled the plug on its AI robotics lab last year. All those adorable little dancing, beep-booping, trash-picker-upper-ing companions! It hurt, imagining them rotting away in a scrapyard somewhere, providing inspiration for, I don't know, Pixar movies, instead of going on to perform the noble, essential, humanity-helping tasks for which they'd been built.
But I moved on, and didn't think about those robots again until some months ago, when I made the acquaintance, over drinks, of the former head of that very lab. Hans Peter Brondmo, it turned out, hadn't quite moved on. He was still grieving. And he wanted to write about it: an insider's account of those abortive seven years. WIRED publishes this sort of thing on occasion, and I love it when we do. Especially when the person is a nice writer. "I actually wrote some blobs already," Hans Peter offered. (Yes, he uses both first names.) "Send me your blobs!" I shouted. Pretty sure some wine flew out of my glass.
Confirmed: Hans Peter, a charismatic American-Norwegian with a published book to his name, writes nicely. The blobs—or vignettes, if you prefer; I don't—not only worked on their own, they built to a complex portrait of a fantastical effort cut short. If Hans Peter is right, Google had the best chance, of any company or startup in history, of roboticizing our future. They had the resources. They had the talent. In the end, it wasn't enough.
