If ever you start to fret about being replaced by a robot in some Terminator-style apocalypse, look up a YouTube video entitled “PR2 Autonomously Pairing Socks”. The two-minute clip from a University of California, Berkeley research project in 2011 shows a robot identifying the two matching pairs from five socks. After carefully flattening the socks to inspect their shape and pattern, it checks they’re not inside out, then couples them.
It’s an impressive feat of robot engineering, of course. But for some it will be quite comforting that this task, dispatched in seconds by us humans, takes the $280,000 Willow Garage PR2 robot fully half an hour. On a cost-benefit basis alone, robot armies are unlikely to be marshalled against us in the near future.
Yet robots are about to invade our homes – and they’re coming not for our laundry but for our children. Rather than androids with arms, clunky thumbs and screens for eyes, they’re arriving as toy cars, balls and babysitters – and costing not $200,000 but $200. You might call them robots in disguise.