They grow up so fast. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas has travelled a long road, eventually winding up in a warehouse sorting car parts. That’s the fate of many young humanoids, but eventually they go on to get a real job. That’s also the case for this robotic assistant.
Atlas is about to enter production, and its first two roles are already secured. The humanoid robot’s transition from experimental hardware to enterprise product will see it working at Google’s DeepMind facility as well as owner Hyundai’s vehicle factories.
World, meet Atlas
The Google DeepMind deployment makes a worrisome sort of sense, since Google and Hyundai/Boston Dynamics are partnering to “integrate cutting edge Gemini Robotics AI foundation models with Boston Dynamics’ new Atlas robots.” DeepMind is getting the ‘bots so Google can work on this integration, but science fiction has taught us that if there’s ever a Skynet-style event, it’ll happen in the place where AI is being given a nimble body to work through.
Hyundai’s usage is far more mundane. There’s a reason Boston Dynamics showed off its humanoid sorting car parts at the latter part of 2024. It happens to be owned by a company that has a vested interest in getting some car parts sorted. The robot will enter service at Hyundai’s factories by 2028, with 2030 hopefully seeing it “extend to component assembly, and over time,[…] also take on tasks involving repetitive motions, heavy loads, and other complex operations.”
In other words, the nimble Atlas will soon see service as an industrial worker, while some models will have cushy jobs in the software sector. Hopefully, in the event of a Terminator situation, the two factions will hate each other enough to give us poor humans a fighting chance.
