Nobody Has Left a Robot Working Overnight, with Yulia Sandamirskaya

Cleaning robots are real. Greeter robots are real. Anything with an arm is not, at least not as a product you can buy and trust to work unsupervised.

Prof. Dr. Yulia Sandamirskaya said it precisely: nobody in the world has yet dared to leave a robot with a manipulator doing real work in a care facility and then gone to bed. That is the line between a demo and a product, and the industry has not crossed it.

She is a professor at ZHAW, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where she leads the Centre for Cognitive Computing in Life Sciences, and she is spinning a company out of her lab to bring robots into elderly care. So this is not scepticism from the sidelines.

We get into neuromorphic computing and why a fruit fly performs acrobatics on roughly 100,000 neurons and almost no power. Then the line that reframes everything: your eye is sharp across only about two degrees and jumps three times a second, so the steady scene in front of you is 95% imagination. Intelligence, she argues, is closer to how many things you can imagine at once than to how much data you collected.

She is blunt about AGI. It has been almost here since the Dartmouth summer school in 1956, and bigger static models do not close the gap. She makes the case against humanoids on legs, because a robot on stairs is a hazard to everyone near it, and describes a Neuraverse where robot skills work like apps.

Her team toured a care home, ended up in the staff room, and she asked a caregiving team leader almost as a joke why he needed robots at all. He paused, then started listing, and she had to get her notebook out. The people who will work beside the machine know where the real bottlenecks are.

She also explains why the business model has to be robot as a service rather than a purchase, and tells the story of her grandmother in Belarus, living alone and refusing help, which is the actual reason she is building this.

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