So Asimo the robot has retired at the tender age of 22, though like a Star Wars Peter Pan he was designed to look like a 14-year-old boy – and now he’ll never grow up.
I met Asimo years ago, in his European base in Brussels. Developed by Honda for untold millions of dollars for reasons that are now mostly forgotten, by engineers who turned out to be wasting their time completely, Asimo was a little spaceman who could walk and jump and climb stairs.
Asimo was also spooky to anyone who’s ever watched a dystopian sci-fi movie. Admittedly, his predecessors were worse: Honda first set out to build a walking robot back in 1986, and the early prototypes looked like boxy TVs on metal legs. Honda’s first humanoid robot came in 1993: named P1, it stood 6ft 2in tall and weighed 175kg (27 stone in old money). P1 was a horror show, given that it was conceived to provide care and company for Japan’s ageing population. Instead of a tender-hearted nurse, P1 looked like it would murder you in your sleep, by dropping a fridge on your head.
That’s why, when Asimo came along in 2000, he was redesigned to look like a sweet, innocent teenager. At 4ft tall, he was ‘the perfect size for helping around the house, or to assist a person confined to a bed or a wheelchair,’ Honda explained. ‘Asimo’s size also allows it to look directly at an adult sitting in a chair or sitting up in bed.’
Ah yes, Asimo’s harrowing dead-eyed gaze: back in Brussels for my one-to-one encounter, Asimo walked up to me and he genuinely appeared to be alive. I mean, it was weird: he walked up like a human, looked at me like a human, he waved at me. But through the tinted screen of his helmet visor, Asimo’s camera-lens eyes were hollow and lifeless like a shark’s, and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t care how lonely I get when I’m old, I’m not having you look after me, you creepy alien.’ Asimo looked like he’d kill you by lethal injection, after invisibly scanning the internet for ‘deadly poisons that can’t be traced’.
Anyway, in the end all that R&D got completely overtaken by Boston Dynamics and the big dollar of the American military-industrial complex.
Honda took 20 years to get Asimo to walk up stairs; Boston Dynamics took just six years to go from its first stumbling humanoid in 2013 to a viral YouTube video of its Atlas robot doing vigorous parkour in 2019.
Thankfully, though, the link between car manufacturing and robots isn’t dead yet, thanks to the fanciful and bizarre world of Elon
