There's widespread awareness in 2023 that AI has started advancing extremely rapidly, but there's less awareness of many of the second-order effects resulting from that. One of those is that AI advances will quickly feed into robotics advances. Robots after all are pure AI embodied into our 3D physical world.

Another thing I don't think people appreciate is that robots of the future may be cheap and ubiquitous. We tend to think of them as humanoid, relatively rare, and somehow "special" because of their near-humanness. Data in Star Trek is a well-known embodiment of this idea.

But what if future robotics is dominated by hundreds of millions of small animal-sized robots, and maybe billions or hundreds of billions of insect-sized robots?

Can’t wait to live in a city patrolled by robot dogs. This dystopian future couldn’t be any brighter. Woooo

/s

I'm working on a robotics ai project as a hobbyist and I was really surprised at how affordable some of these quadruped robots have become. The one I would like to eventually try is between $1600 and $2k (USD) but the models in the $500-$1000 look darn good to. Having smaller boards for multiple ai processes to run together is really changing th feasibility of projects quickly.