Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future

by Rohit Bhargava

  Jibo Bot With Personality

  If you were imagining the robot of the future, you might have pictured a category of robots known as “service bots,” developed mainly to take over doing the things that none of us want to do...often more quietly and efficiently than you could do yourself. The Roomba vacuum cleaner introduced many people to the concept of having a robot in the home. Startups like RoboMow and LawnBot offer robot lawnmowing devices that are growing in popularity.

  Apart from everyday-cleaning or housework bots, there have also been interesting experiments with robots in non-obvious ways in unexpected locations–often from the travel and hospitality industry. Royal Caribbean’s Quantam of the Seas cruise ship, for example, set sail with a duo of robotic bartenders trained to mix and pour up to two cocktails a minute. Las Vegas has the “Tipsy Robot:” a bar staffed entirely by robots that makes mixed drinks for passersby on the Miracle Mile Shops inside the Planet Hollywood complex.

  The robotics startup Savioke has been working with more than a dozen hotels to provide a robot named Relay as an “autonomous butler” that can deliver items from the front desk to guest rooms. The bots have been so popular that front-desk staff at their partner hotels report that people are calling with requests just to see the bot in action.

  This is the useful and utilitarian world of service bots, which are adept at handling small details, nuances, quirks, and inconveniences, but only aspire to do these tasks as quietly and efficiently as possible. They are the foundation of the Robot Renaissance, created to solve problems and laser-focused on the tasks they were built for.

  And then there was Jibo.

  Robots With Personality

  Promoted as the “first social robot for the home,” Jibo was a robot with personality. Designed to look a bit like the animated desk lamp from the Pixar animated short Jibo used two high-res cameras to track faces and capture photos, learn your preferences, and use natural and social cues to act in more human ways.

  After running for six years and burning through nearly $73 million in funding the team behind Jibo significantly downsized around the end of 2018, and seems to be on its last legs at the time of this publication. Fellow pioneer in the social robotics category Mayfield Robotics (makers of the Kuri robot) has already shut down sales and operations.[74]

  Perhaps they were both products ahead of their time, and, at close to $1,000 each, sold at a price too high to appeal to the mass market they needed. Yet the category of social robots with personality that they pioneered is soldiering on.

  In late 2018, the home robotics company Anki released their own home robot called Vector, with a tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign that poked fun at all the ways people were increasingly afraid that over-zealous robots might take over. The marketing taglines for the new bot entertainingly made the point that Vector was different: “Smart enough to take over the world. Nice enough not to.”

  Vector - The Good Robot

  Like many other robots built with human-like personality traits, Vector is closer to a functional toy than a serious human companion or workplace colleague. A Japanese robot named Pepper, on the other hand, looks exactly the way science-fiction authors have long imagined a working robot might look.

  Pepper: Your First Robotic Co-Worker

  Pepper has a humanoid-looking head, two eyes, and a touchpad on his (yes, his gender has officially been named male) chest to input commands. The promotional website about him from Japanese maker Softbank Robotics describes him in humanlike terms:

  ”Pepper is a human-shaped robot. He is kindly, endearing, and surprising. Pleasant and likeable, Pepper is much more than a robot; he is a genuine humanoid companion created to communicate with you in the most natural and intuitive way, through his body movements and his voice. We have designed Pepper to be a genuine day-to-day companion, whose number- one quality is his ability to perceive emotions.”

  When brought into the home, Pepper is described as having been “adopted” by his host family “buy” him for a flat fee, then make monthly payments to keep him updated and active. Designed to interact with humans, Pepper can express himself through the color of his eyes, his tablet, or his tone of voice.

  Outside of the home, Pepper is also being trialed in pilot programs across the world to greet customers and provide information. For example, in April of 2018, the Smithsonian museum complex in Washington, D.C. put several Pepper robots in museums to sense when people were close by and engage them in conversation. The aim of the program was to learn how an automated guide like Pepper could perhaps bring people to under-attended galleries, or offer deeper engagement by doing things like translating inscriptions or explaining the history of artwork.

  While Pepper has certainly captured significant attention, he is a conservative example when compared to those in a controversial category increasingly being described as “companion robots.”

  Sentbots and Robot Citizenship

  This new breed of robots fits what Sirius XM founder Martine Rothblatt calls “sentbots.” No stranger to being a trailblazer herself as the first transgender female CEO of a major company, she recently shared in an interview, “The Roomba is to the sentbots of tomorrow kind of like the luggable compact computer is to the smartphone of today.”[75]

  Rothblatt commissioned a robotics company called Hanson Robotics to create the first of these “sentbots” with features and a personality inspired by her wife, Mina. The resulting robot, called Mina48, is bilingual, and even spoke at a Ted Talk in Havana. Rothenblatt believes future robots will be customizable, with personalities that can be “uploaded” via access to your social media profiles, such as Facebook and Instagram.

  Bina48 Sentbot (Photo Credit: @hansonrobotics on Instagram)

  Hanson Robotics also built Sophia, who is widely considered one of the most advanced of the human-like robots ever made. In October 2017, in what was mostly a well-calculated publicity stunt, Saudi Arabia became the first country to grant citizenship to a robot when Sophia was conferred the honor in a ceremony during the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Riyadh.

  In 2019, Sophia will even have her own “surreality show” entitled Being Sophia. We will be able to watch “Sophia’s emerging life, adventures, experiences, and her quest to learn and develop into a super-intelligent, benevolent being.”[76]

  Love in a Time of Sexbots

  For some, the relationship with robots will soon offer a more physical option. Realdoll is a company that sells human-like robots for sex encounters. With their own custom-built Artificial Intelligence engine, the company already has a subscription-based app that allows customers to create their own virtual girlfriend on their phones and converse with her. For the affluent fan who wants a more...personal encounter, male and female versions of the dolls are for sale. And for curious consumers who are not quite ready to buy, a Toronto-based company called Kinky S Dolls has already opened the world’s first robotic brothel, and has announced plans to open a second one in Houston.

  This entire category and the evolution of this sector will be seen by many readers as clearly crossing the line. Do we really need or want people to be able to enter into these types of encounters with robots? Is it even ethical to do so? Right now, these are open questions, and will remain so as this Robot Renaissance continues.

  Why It Matters

  Robots have been the subject of science-fiction speculation for decades, and every year, it’s easy to think that it will be the “year of the robot.” In the process of curating trends, I probably read at least one article a year making that exact prediction–all of which makes me more reluctant than most to have any trend focused solely on robotics. Yet the truth, supported by numbers and technology, is that we do seem to be at a tipping point in our consciousness around robots and their role in society.

  We are asking big questions about how we should be treating these robots in our midst. We are training ourselves how to interact most effectively with them. And non-obvious innovators are increasi
ngly building them in our own likeness to reflect us, make them engaging to interact with, and offer companionship of all kinds.

  How to Use This Trend

  Make friends with robots–As more robots are built with learning personalities, we will need to consider which lessons our behaviors might be teaching them–both intentional and unintentional. Much like a child gets its first impressions on how to act from its parents, robots, too, may soon be imprinted with these sorts of manners from humans. This is an opportunity as well as a threat, but the first step is learning to embrace robots in the right situations and treat them not with fear or contempt, but with curiosity and yes, perhaps even friendship.

  Explore robots across your value chain–Every organization must periodically expand its thinking to include non-obvious ways of utilizing robots, whether human-like or chatbot, in every aspect of its value chain for customers–from the end experience to the sourcing and creation of products. In some cases, this may mean greater automation of things previously done by humans as a business necessity.

  16

  Good Speed

  What’s the Trend?

  The urgency of the problems facing humanity is inspiring corporations, entrepreneurs, and individuals to find ways of doing good (and generating results) faster.

  In the middle of the ocean, a patch of garbage covering a geographic area nearly the size of Mexico is expanding every day. The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” as it is widely known, is made up mostly of one material—plastic, an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of it. Given its size and the severity of its environmental impact, the Patch is a perfect example of what appears to be an unsolvable global problem.

  These types of intractable problems—particularly related to the environment—seem to be all around us. For example, in early October 2018, a landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change concluded that humans may reach severe climate-change consequences as early as 2040. In recent years, we have also seen countries around the world, from the U.S. to Brazil, elect leaders who either deny climate change is real or are politically unwilling to do anything about it.

  When you consider these dire predictions along with the scale of the environmental problems facing us, it’s no wonder many feel pessimistic about our future. WIRED magazine co-founder Louis Rosetto described all of us a “prisoners of unrelenting pessimism.”[77]

  Boyan Slat isn’t someone who feels this pessimism. Just a few weeks before that scary United Nations report was released, the 24-year-old Dutch social entrepreneur launched a test for the most ambitious project to remove plastic from the ocean ever. Called simply The Ocean Cleanup, Slat’s solution consists of deploying a nearly 2,000-foot-long tube attached to a plastic netting into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

  The idea is that plastic will float into the net, which would then be collected and brought to shore for recycling every few months. Using this method, Slat hopes to remove 90 percent of the plastic that is currently in our oceans by the year 2040, and has plenty of financial support to try to make his ambitious idea work.

  How The Ocean Cleanup works (Illustration courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup)

  As the challenges we face—from helping those who are less fortunate than ourselves to saving our shared planet—are becoming larger and more complex, pioneering entrepreneurs and leaders of responsible companies are responding to them with increased urgency, inspired innovation, and speed. This trend, which we are calling Good Speed, describes how all of this good is happening at a pace that is faster than ever before.

  The speed is helping drive a new form of what Rosetto calls “militant optimism,” a force that has the power to ensure we don’t lose hope, even in the face of such large global challenges. From all the stories we uncovered in researching this chapter, it is hard to disagree.

  “If we really want to make a better world for our children, we need to believe that the future will be better.” — Louis Rosetto, Co-founder, WIRED magazine

  Brands Doing Good—and Doing It Fast

  The worldwide concern about the impact that plastic and other waste is having in our environment is not restricted to nonprofit or environmental groups. For-profit companies are taking the challenge head on, as well, and sometimes in wonderfully proactive ways.

  LEGO, for example, has launched a massive initiative to find a more sustainable material with which to manufacture its iconic product. The Danish brand is investing more than $150 million more than 100 people to work on this challenge.[78]

  Their devotion to finding new and sustainable ways to make their products is noteworthy in itself. But what is even more impressive is that they seem to be doing it unprompted by regulations or public pressure.

  No one asked LEGO to change their bricks. There is no widespread consumer demand for eco-friendlier LEGOs. If anything, most of their customers would prefer LEGO bricks to stay exactly the same–unless they can somehow find a way to make them less painful when one steps on them early in the morning. LEGO recognized the effects its products were having on the environment, and wanted to act as quickly as possible to try and do better.

  They are not alone. Another brand making it a priority to help the environment by reconsidering their practices—and doing so on a relatively fast timetable—is Swedish retailer Ikea.

  The world’s producer of the most disposable furniture in the world wants customers to stop throwing away the furniture they buy from them when they no longer want it. The company has found that people have a perception that the low price of their furniture makes it acceptable to only use it once and then throw it away, rather than selling, donating, or recycling it as they might with more expensive furniture.

  To counter this misperception, the brand has launched several pilot programs across the world to encourage consumers to bring their used furniture back into the store. The store then either recycles or sells the furniture “as-is.” In exchange, customers receive a voucher to be used against new purchases.

  This is a similar idea to what mission-driven outdoor retailer Patagonia has done for years with their outdoor gear: encouraging their customers to save and recycle them, and even creating their own online marketplace called “Worn Wear” for customers to resell their used gear for others to enjoy.

  Patagonia Worn Wear website (http://wornwear.patagonia.com)

  Goodpreneurs

  Unfortunately, not every business is focused on creating quite so much long lasting utility. In the past few years, far too many Silicon Valley startups have been justifiably ridiculed for creating impractical innovations that solved non-existent problems—like the $400 Juicero (an unnecessarily expensive way to squeeze fruit) or the Pause Pod (an indoor tent for office workers needing quiet time).

  Partly as a way to counter these exercises in frivolous invention, just over a decade ago,, entrepreneur Ankur Jain founded a fund called Kairos (named for the Greek word for opportunity). Its mission is simple: helping young entrepreneurs innovate solutions to problems that people in the real world face. This mission has inspired its entrepreneurs, who are almost all under the age of 30, to create more affordable urban housing, healthy baby food for low-income families, and solutions for providing better eldercare. Every few months, the fund launches a new startup, and its success has been enviable: the last group of Kairos companies raised $600 million in funding, and is currently valued at $2.5 billion.

  Large companies are also encouraging and supporting entrepreneurs to tackle big environmental challenges, usually through contests and initiatives that bring ideas together, and are offering them funding and visibility to implement and hopefully generate results.

  Fast fashion retailer H&M, for example, hosts an annual contest for startups developing technologies to help make fashion greener. The winners share a €1 million prize. Recent winners include Smart Stitch, a company that makes a thread that dissolves at high temperatures to make recycling easier, and Crop-A-Porter, a startup that spins yarn out of field waste fro
m banana and pineapple plantations.

  In another recent example, two of the largest retailers in the world, Starbucks and McDonald’s, teamed up to create the NextGen Cup Challenge, which tasks entrepreneurs to design a new, fully recyclable and compostable drink cup within the next three years. A key element of doing good faster is doing it at scale. When we talk about Good Speed–change is certainly happening faster. It is an equally important element of this trend to note that we are describing the growing examples in the world (like these) in which change is being implemented faster, thanks to these large-scale efforts.

  Every Person–and Every Donation–Counts

  Celebrity chef Jose Andrés doesn’t spend much time thinking about how he can help in the face of a tragedy. He just goes wherever he is needed. Long known for his pioneering cuisine using molecular gastronomy, he has also become a symbol of how much difference one person can make. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Andrés was on the ground cooking meals for people and encouraging them to rebuild their lives through food-related businesses, like starting a bakery or creating a coffee-roasting collective. He even wrote a bestselling book about the experience.