Mo Gawdat glimpsed the apocalypse in a robot arm. Or rather, in a bunch of robot arms, all being developed together. An arm farm. They had been tasked, these arms, with learning how to pick up children’s toys. Not like vices, but like hands. Gently. Delicately. Navigating unfamiliar shapes.
For a long time they were getting nowhere. Week after week of fumbling. And, as the chief business officer of Google X – the mad, moonshot bit of Google, the blue-sky dreaming bit, the bit he describes by saying, “Have you ever seen Men in Black?” – Gawdat would walk past them every day, hearing them whine up and down, but not really paying much attention.
Then, one day, an arm picked up a yellow
