* Illustration: Martin Woodtli * Automatons work pretty well — if you're looking to weld thousands of cars exactly the same way. But what we really want is C-3P0: a robot that looks, acts, and responds like a human, except is easier to boss around. So why don't we have one?
Well, despite sophisticated mathematics and years of experimentation, we still aren't very good at modeling life. Motors don't replicate muscles. Cameras aren't eyes. And computers are definitely not brains. But we're so set on that humanoid robot (Hollywood creates unrealistic body-shape expectations for androids, too) that we're killing ourselves to perfect biomimicry, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. Each of those fields has claimed countless careers as the discipline marches into one dead end after another, and together they're a recipe for perpetual disappointment. That's why US roboticists are secretly delighted that the world's robotics superpower has fallen in love with walking man-machines: Japan will spin its gears for decades while the real advances come in specialized single-purpose bots that are more Roomba than Asimo.
