Where will robots serve in the future?
Kumar: They’ll fight our wars. My robots will fight your robots. It’s like playing chess. It’ll be an expensive game, but I think it will minimize loss of life. I don’t know it’s something our leaders want to hear about, though. What’s the future of robots in the services sector? Thorpe: That’s the real frontier for robots — getting them out of the manufacturing world and interacting much more with people in our day-to-day chores. That’s a little tougher. If you think about an assembly line, it’s set up so that everything is predictable. If you think about the job of creating a robot butler to operate in your house, the difference between pile of clothes which should be picked up and a sleeping cat which shouldn’t be picked up is a little bit tricky.