Opinion | The hyper vision of almost every disruptive technology
This year’s Vegas Consumer Electronics Show dished up Aibo, a robot dog; Luka, a robot owl who babysits; Aeolus, a roaming nanny who mops floors and puts away dishes; and Forpheus, a 10-foot-tall giant spider that hovers over a ping-pong table, built to be the perfect ping-pong companion
Among a certain strand of tech enthusiasts, there exists a peculiar form of amnesia. It’s a sort of collective memory loss inescapable because of the many technology conferences happening each year: The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC); Game Developers Conference (GDC); The Next Web (TNW); South by Southwest (SXSW); TechCrunch Disrupt; and, the biggest, flashiest, and oldest – Las Vegas’ The Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
The CES in 1977 in Chicago was where the world’s first personal computer – the Commodore PET – made its debut. The same year, Steve Jobs incorporated Apple Computer in Cupertino, California.
Four decades on, CES remains the biggest and the flashiest tech conference, with some 3,900 exhibiting companies covering 2.6 million square feet touting their wares to around 170,000 gawking visitors last January.
“What will the gadget fest look like in ‘the Year of A.I.’?” asked The New York Times drily.
With AI (artificial intelligence) in full rage, the ubiquitous presence of robots at CES shouldn’t surprise anyone. There was Aibo, a robot dog; Luka, a robot owl who babysits; Aeolus, a roaming nanny who mops floors and puts away dishes; Sophia, a full-blown humanoid who recently acquired citizenship in Saudi Arabia; and my favourite: Forpheus, a 10-foot-tall giant spider that hovers over a ping-pong table, built to be the perfect ping-pong companion.
