More than 500 million years ago, life consisted of hyper-simplistic single-celled organisms. Then, suddenly, a massive explosion of diversity happened almost in parallel, immediately, across all major animal phyla. This is referred to as the Cambrian explosion.
I think we're on a similar trajectory in the next few important years for robotics. Here's why: companies are creating robotics which mimic many morphologies of complex cellular life. Festo, one such company, created robotic birds, bees, and even a robot jellyfish many years ago.
Patterns that took nature hundreds of millions of years to refine and evolve, we as humans are about to copy wholesale and apply them for our benefit. Each of these robots can come equipped with a VLA (vision language action) model, where we can convert actual human language plus the robot's vision to create actual action in the real world.
Our first and most natural response was to create humanoids - robots that model human interactions, because we've built a human shaped world. But the macro world beyond that is one shaped by nature, forces far beyond our own comprehension or reckoning. Even thinking about the cellular logic, the totality of how an immortal jellyfish exists, or how a hopping insect has gears in their legs, shows just how much we've yet to learn from the nature around us.
Our fallacy is that we've overvalued the flimsy human morphology - why do we need robots with five fingers, when scientists developed a sixth robotic finger for humans? The real purpose of shaped robotics is to accommodate the work being done, and working backwards to the actual form factor. If you look at nature, the environment dictated the form - not the other way around.
Long story short, I think we're going to have water bear-shaped robots slowly climbing glass skyscrapers via vacuum suction legs and cleaning windows. Just like how vibe-coding made it trivial for someone to put out a diversity of sexy interfaces in record time, robotics is growing the primitives necessary for any form factor to be built anywhere. Including bees.
I'm in SF for the next few weeks, so if you're around, say hi!
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov