Thanks Emil for your thoughts here.

My point about physical dexterity and mobility certainly causes the most debate when I discuss this at various events — indeed, if nothing else, my talks and writing are intended to act as a catalyst for these kind of discussions about the future.

Despite the hype around robotics, and AI for that matter, I think we are a long way from the kind of mobility and dexterity you might imagine. An artificially sentient, fully mobile, terminator style robot is unlikely to be a reality in this century if at all in any century. There are many reasons for this not least of which technological activity is just another aspect of human endeavour and creating autonomous weapons is just not a good idea. But you are quite right to bring attention to the technological risk that, as a society, we may so fall in love with our technology that we do something stupid with it. Ethics is an issue here.

With regards to the point around dexterity/mobility however I’m really not convinced that we as designers and technologists can compete with nature. We as humans, after all, have been designed or have evolved (subject to your perspective) to operate well within this environment and we have built the things around us for human use.

The back-flipping gymnastic robot from Boston Dynamics is very exciting and impressive but they are programmed/designed for a limited range of tasks none of which are creative. Ask the back-flipping robot to take a swim then choreograph a dance, paint a picture then make me a meal and we run in to all kinds of difficulty. We may be able to design a robot to do my gardening and clean my house and I look forward to those developments but I wouldn’t be asking a robot to design my garden so there’s a future for working alongside our robot companions rather than compete with them.