Robotics: from warfare to welfare.

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This is the ninth of our new weekly strategic series of Top Ten Anticipations for 2025 – 2030. Topic number eight, "Your digital asset vault", can be found here: https://lnkd.in/g2vCySHq​
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The word “robot” is actually over 100 years old – it was created as part of a Czech science fiction play from 1920 called R. U. R.

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In the Czech language “robota” means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands many moons ago, and is derived from rab, meaning "slave".

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The play is set in a factory which makes artificial workers; though they may be mistaken for humans they have no original thoughts. The premise is that although most are content to work for humans, eventually a rebellion causes the extinction of the human race.

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In the following year, “The Mechanical Man” was an Italian movie which depicted the first fight between two robots.

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Today roughly half of all the robots in the world are in Asia, with the majority of those (around 40% of the total) being in Japan.
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As we look forward to 2030, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics will redefine autonomy.
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As AI continues to advance, robots will become more capable of performing tasks that require problem-solving and decision-making skills.
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This will empower robots to make choices, learn from their environments, and adapt to complex, dynamic situations.
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Much positive progress has been made on the software side in recent years, but hardware advancements are equally important.
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Improvements rely on evermore advanced semiconductor chips, which are now part of a geopolitical bifurcation between the USA and China.
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Motor skills that allow for dynamic manipulation are second-nature to us humans, but they are fiendishly complex to engineer and train in robots.
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Moreover, optimistic narratives about fully autonomous general-purpose humanoid robots embedded with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) being with us within the 2025-2030 timeline are not realistic.
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Ergo, whilst robots will continue to progress – by 2030 it will be “more of the same but better”, rather than a full-scale revolution (or, dare we say it, rebellion).
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The robots of 2030 will therefore have an added capacity to learn, plus will become more accessible via natural language conversation.
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Much as Generative AI today works best in tandem with humans – rather than as a replacement – robotics come 2030 will in this way increase productivity and quality.
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We can expect to see significant numbers of increasingly sophisticated robots incorporated into more areas of life, working with humans.
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Autonomous military drones (in the air, on the land, at sea, and in space) will be ubiquitous.
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In healthcare, they will become more critical in assisting surgeons during complex procedures; leading semiconductor firm NVIDIA is pushing hard into medical and wants to move into “physical AI”.
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Robots will continue to advance when it comes to mass producing goods on production lines, and skating around buildings ensuring floors are clean - but will largely be singular-tasked rather than polyfunctional.
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Fully autonomous Level 5 vehicles will still be many years out, even in 2030.
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Contrary to dystopian-minded prophets of fear and doom, between 2025 and 2030 these improved robots will not replace all workers.
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Alas, you will still need to do your own washing and ironing for a while longer.
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Next up in our strategic series of Top Ten Anticipations for 2025 – 2030 is titled "Convergence of Bio, Health-tech, and Digital" - which we'll deliver in HORIZON next week.

Over one in five people worldwide (23%) said they felt loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday”, according to data collected by public opinion firm Gallup.

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As a result, we're seeing more people turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for companionship, seeking their soulmate.
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Replika was founded eight years ago...and essentially created the business of AI friends.
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"In my view, the AI companions are potentially one of the most dangerous technologies we’ve ever created" founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda recently said to The New York Times during the DealBook Summit.
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Let that sink in for a moment...
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Replika has millions of users (all 18+) around the world today.
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The stigmatised stereotype for such a user is young, male, single, and lonely.
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However, according to the firm the app serves users "mostly 35-plus" - and includes a balance of men and women.
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As well as a female CEO, the Chief Product Officer is also a woman.
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Company literature includes "AI companion with a soul" and "If you’re feeling down, or anxious, or you just need someone to talk to, your Replika is here for you 24/7".
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It has a controversial history, both being exploited (men creating and then verbally abusing companions) as well as dishing out harassment (bots being overly-sexual with users).
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It's not all negative; a Stanford University study found that many Replika users claimed their chatbot had deterred them from committing suicide.
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Nevertheless, relationships are about people; using AI in this realm is in the main unhealthy and could be a very slippery social slope.
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Let's not forget back in 2022 when Google fired a senior software engineer who claimed the company's AI chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.
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The focus is largely skewed towards what this sort of tech can do FOR us, and not enough on what it can do TO us.
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The bigger question for the future must be: why do some people feel its necessary - or preferable - to turn to these types of synthesised support services, often extending into long-term attachments over years?
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It's a serious human-centric topic which requires care, sensitivity, and focus now...before usage of the tech get dangerously out of control.
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Previous post about DAN in China: https://lnkd.in/g-XHjbKy​
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Previous post about dating "wingman" AI agent: https://lnkd.in/gd3kEFYW​
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Previous post about Addictive Intelligence: https://lnkd.in/gN5iupS8

2025 will be a year of great progress when it comes to Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology.

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BCI refers to a system that uses non-invasive methods to read brain signals and translate them into external commands.
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As well as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, China is making significant strides in BCI, with plans for a large-scale clinical trial next year.
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The aim is to recruit 30 to 50 spinal cord injury patients for implantation across ten centres nationwide.
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Those chosen will receive a semi-invasive implant (with electrodes positioned outside the brain cortex) called NEO - Neural Electronic Opportunity.
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NEO is a coin-sized device embedded in the skull to collect neural signals from sensory and motor brain areas; power and signal transmission are facilitated by an external magnetic coil connected through the scalp.
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NEO has already proven its efficacy in earlier implantations: three human implantation surgeries have been successfully completed this year, showing promising results.
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Most recently, the device was implanted into a 38-year-old spinal cord injury patient in Shanghai who had lost mobility and hand function due to a car accident.
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The operation was completed in just 1 hour and 40 minutes (approximately half the time required for the previous two patients) thanks to an online brain function localisation system.
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This innovation allowed surgeons to pinpoint hand motor and sensory brain regions rapidly.
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By the third day after the operation, the patient was able to get out of bed and sit in a wheelchair; he was discharged from hospital within a week.
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Using a prosthetic glove the patient can now control brain signals to perform daily tasks unaided like picking up a water cup, unscrewing a bottle cap, and drinking.
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Once the large-scale clinical trial is complete, clinical data will be submitted to regulatory authorities to seek approval to commercialise NEO.
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NEO has become the first BCI to enter China's "green channel" for special approval of innovative medical devices, and it is projected to be available for clinical use by 2027.
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Doctors are optimistic that the further development of BCI technology will help many patients with neurological impairments, including those having suffered a stroke, regain some basic life abilities.
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Recent additional vision-related BCI post: https://lnkd.in/eA4uN6fS​
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BCIs will be personalised as each person's brain algorithm differs, as well as optimised for the physical requirements of each patient.
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For younger patients, early intervention and subsequent rehabilitation are expected to restore a higher quality of life in the future.
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Previous post on Neuralink BCI: https://lnkd.in/ePXRhm78

Proving that you're a real human seems to be getting harder than ever.

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You'll no doubt be familiar with CAPTCHA tests, designed for users to click through a series of images in a grid pattern, selecting specific objects.
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CAPTCHA means "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".
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CAPTCHA was a Carnegie Mellon University research project first launched in 2000 as a general purpose authentication technique for humans.
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The value of CAPTCHA tests are not that they completely stop automated bots, but the value is that they make attacks prohibitively expensive.
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For some time this deterrence has been effective; now, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model has been trained to become expert at solving these puzzles - solving them 100% of the time.
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Specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items such as motorcycles.
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ReCAPTCHAv2 is heavily based on cookie and browser history data when evaluating whether a user is human or not.
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This AI research and development was carried out by three researchers at ETH Zurich.
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After training the model on 14,000 labeled traffic images, the researchers had a system that could identify the probability that any provided CAPTCHA grid image belonged to one of ReCAPTCHA v2's 13 candidate categories.
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On top of this, the team added several other meaningful elements.
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Fake browser and cookie information from real web browsing sessions was used to make the automated agent appear more human.
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A special mouse movement model was created to approximate human activity, and a Virtual Private Network (VPN) was used to avoid detection of repeated attempts from the same IP address.
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The good news is that v2 is not the latest-and-greatest; it was released in 2014, and Google has been actively working to sunset it for many years already - but it remains in widespread usage.
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ReCAPTCHA v3 was released in 2018 - it uses an "invisible" advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep bots from engaging in abusive activities on a website; no more clicking of squares.
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Unless, of course, it is uncertain if you are human...in which case v3 has a fallback option with the same v2 squares and mandatory clicks.
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As iterative AI models rapidly become more adept at impersonating human behaviour, the cat-and-mouse game to provide adequate protection gets harder.
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As the ETH team note: "...a good CAPTCHA marks the exact boundary between the most intelligent machine and the least intelligent human".
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Our future CAPTCHA technologies must thus quickly evolve to ensure the continued reliability and safety of our online environments.
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Picture courtesy of the excellent "RAF_Luton" account on X / Twitter.

This is why we can't have nice things.

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Just when there's an iota of positivity and some partial acceptance, we have another "pump and dump" episode in the chaotic cornucopia of crypto.
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Also known as a "rug pull", "pump and dump" is where the people behind a coin hype up its price before launch, then sell it for profit.
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"Hawk Tuah" is an Internet meme originating from a viral YouTube video posted in mid-2024.
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The person at the epicentre of this inadvertent stardom (the term used in its loosest possible capacity) is Haliey Welch - and she has, understandably, been milking her 15 minutes of social media fame ever since.
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Embracing the modus operandi of an influencer, she has a merch line, began making paid appearances, and has created a podcast (Talk Tuah).
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So the obvious next monetisation step in her supercharged journey was to create a bespoke digital asset - though not solely to make herself money, of course.
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"It's a really good way to get all my fans and community to interact and come together" she said.
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22 year-old Welch launched a crypto meme coin called HAWK on the Solana blockchain on 4th December.
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Initially, Hawkcoin experienced a stratospheric rise shortly after its debut fanfare, reaching a market cap of nearly USD$500 million.
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However, this success was short-lived: the coin value plummeted like a meteor, losing over 90% within hours, settling at around $41.7 million.
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The rapid decline raises questions about the project's legitimacy and the motives behind its management.
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Welch has denied allegations that her team sold any of the tokens they owned.
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The absence of a publicly disclosed tokenomics prior to the launch was a red flag.
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Frankly, the creation of this sort of digital asset is "about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest" (quote: Rowen Atkinson).
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Previous post about how crypto needs a designated adult: https://lnkd.in/gFEX2NTX)
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There are millions of memecoins out there already; most have no business model, cash flow or fundamental value but instead rely on their popularity among traders to generate liquidity.
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The price of leading crypto Bitcoin has broken through and hovered around the USD$100k mark for the last month.
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This has led to the largest asset manager in the world BlackRock suggesting it is reasonable to hold it as 2% of a balanced portfolio, reinforcing the trajectory of acceptance of digital assets into the financial mainstream.
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However, as long as memecoins can be created to quickly exploit any pop culture fad - with a select few making fortunes and the majority losing due to FOMO - crypto will struggle to obtain any semblance of respectability.
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More accountability, regulation, oversight, governance, and transparency are needed rapidly.
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Time to grow up if crypto wants to really fly in future.