Call me back when you lose the tether. I see this constantly in science/tech reporting. “Third Arm Punches Through Walls!”, “Mosquito-size drone takes flight!”, “Nano-bots can police your bloodstream!” and many other 10/20 years too early crap stories about products that could potentially be useful if and only if they didn’t require a tether to a power supply or external computational power. A mosquito-size drone will never, ever be useful until it includes a way to autonomously power itself, and solving THAT problem represents the real challenge. Until that happens, it’s all just wishful thinking.
I don’t know. I hear humans are very inefficient and emit a lot of greenhouse gasses. I’d hope robots are smarter than that.
Given all the machinery needed to make it work at this point, it’s already almost entirely stationary - the human is acting as the rail, effectively, but with even more limited movement.
Which would require it to be fully autonomous. (Otherwise it’s “move elbow joint 13 degrees…” which doesn’t work very well.)
As it currently exists, that really is the only context for it. That’s the problem with rushing to “practical” uses when you only have a rough prototype - you end up with some pretty dystopian uses…
Ultimately there’s a low limit to how strong a robotic arm like this can be, and that’s the part where it is connected to a fleshy being mostly made of water. Until you’re talking about entire body replacement or switching to powered armor/exoskeletons it can only be as strong as the point where it attaches to your body.
Trying to think of a PG response that rhymes with “wall”…
“Why build an entire robot when all you need is the hand” (from The Big Bang Theory TV show)
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