I hadn't seen Emiglio in years -- probably not since the mid-'90s when I would catch glimpses of him on TV and sigh wistfully. But then one night a couple months ago, in a bar in Porto, suddenly there he was, in the flesh -- or should I say, the plastic.
Emiglio, you see, is a robot. A knee-high butler with a bulbous white head, cartoon grin and red glowing eyes. I spent my childhood longing for him to bring me fun drinks on his little tray while I reclined on the sofa, glued to back-to-back Animaniacs episodes. Looking back, my desire for Emiglio may well have been the reason I committed myself to a career in writing about technology.
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Like many fantasies humans harbor about robots, this one was ill-thought-out. Who would have made the fun little drinks and balanced them on Emiglio's tray? How would he have known where to take them? And who, ultimately, would have helped him navigate two rooms from the kitchen to me?
This Emiglio was a little worse for wear, but then he was living in a bar. Katie Collins/CNET
Many of the issues that kept Emiglio from being a genuinely useful butler are the same limitations real-world robots still struggle with today. As much as I hate to admit it, Emiglio was little more than a glorified remote-control car with a face, needing human assistance to do almost anything.
The same is true of Neo, the humanoid home helper robot that went viral in late October but still requires teleoperation by a human. The two robots are separated by more than 30 years, yet their real-world usefulness and ability to operate autonomously feel similarly disappointing.
A question I ask myself each year as I return to CES -- the giant tech trade show the CNET team decamps to every January -- is when the many robots I've met there will finally prove worthy of a place in our homes.
Overcoming the AI bottleneck (and why VLAs matter)
"The main obstacle between us and genuinely useful home robots is the AI," renowned computer scientist Ben Goertzel said when I sat down with him at the tech-focused Web Summit in Lisbon last month. The physical capabilities of robots have progressed dramatically between Emiglio and Neo. What's holding back Neo, and other home robots, is ultimately the smarts.
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