Jon: Welcome to episode 145 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett and with me is founder and cohost Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hi there, Jon.

Jon: For our podcast this week, Dirk, I'd like to discuss the potential for a world filled with robots and what this means for people and for design, generally speaking.

Dirk: Isn't it already a world filled with robots? Aren't we already there?

Jon: We are there to an extent, if you're in the manufacturing biz, for certain, and there are all kinds of robots in the warehouse area as well.

Dirk: I remember in the mid 1980s, Jon, my grandfather gave me an electronic chess set, and I could set the level and it would play against me. Now, there was no being sitting on the other side of the table, but the little lights would show me what moves to make. Isn't that a robot?

Jon: I would think so, in a sort of classic, general definition.

Dirk: We've got a lot of those, I think. We've got a lot of those around these days.

Jon: Sure. There's plenty of robots of different stripe. I think, for me, the revelation that I had while watching Boston Dynamics' recent demo of their latest bipedal robot, which is called Atlas. It's their Version 2. You can go on YouTube and find this video demo of this robot doing things like walking through the woods or working in a warehouse. The revelation that I had was that there were going to be these bipedal collaborative robots that might be more present, say, than the chess robot that you referred to. So, something that is more evident in my everyday life than, say, in the outer reaches or very specific applications like you suggested. What was your impression of the Boston Dynamics demo there?

Dirk: My impression is complicated, so I actually want to start with your impression because I think yours is more what more people would have felt and would expect. So first share your impression. Talk about the video a little more and talk about what you thought of it, and then we'll circle back to me.

Jon: All right, fair enough. Just to be clear, I want to describe a little bit more what's on the video, and of course we'll put a link up on our website so listeners, you can go and view it as well if you already haven't seen it.

Atlas is this robot that's about 5'9", 180 pounds or so, and it looks frankly like a robot that you might see in that iRobot Will Smith movie from a few years ago. As I mentioned, it walks upright on two legs. It has a funny little gait, so it sort of looks like it's picking up its knees a little bit higher than a human would when it's walking, and the video is really amazing. It starts with Atlas in the lobby of Boston Dynamics, and Atlas is going for a walk, so the robot pushes open the door and heads out into the lovely snowy New England woods of the Boston Dynamics campus.

It's walking along, picking its way over these logs and snow-covered leaves and generally doing a very good job of it. In these first few moments of the video, you notice that the robot is kind of slipping and righting itself as it does so, so the reality of the uneven ground, the natural surroundings where a human being would probably not have too much trouble walking, this robot is navigating it and doing so in a way that I found fairly amazing. I have a young son, and it kind of reminded me of the tentative walking of, not a toddler but slightly older than that.

Now this next part of the video I found a little bit ... It made me a little bit uneasy, and it was the part where Atlas is demoing what it can do in the warehouse. So it's picking up boxes and putting them on shelves, which I think are ... It's a fairly common task in the warehouse, but then there's also this moment where it's trying to pick up a box, and there's a Boston Dynamics employee and he comes over and he knocks the box out of its hand very deliberately with a hockey stick.